Tag: comparisons

Ironically, I asked for this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the big selling points I used on my dad when I was arduously trying to talk him to move down to Georgia, other than the fact that everything made sense, was that with him being somewhat in the Metro Atlanta area, not only could I see him with tremendously more regularly than any member of his family had been able to see him over the last 10+ years, he could now participate in things like holidays, events and milestone occasions, like the Pre-K graduation of his granddaughter.

Yes, I know that in the grand spectrum of things, Pre-K graduations are pretty much important only to the parents of the children ‘graduating’ from preschool, but it’s one of those things where I’ve been to enough children’s things over the last six years to understand and have witnessed all sorts of healthy family dynamics where grandparents often show up to events as such, because it’s what family does – show up.

Because graduation day was kind of hectic on account of an altered schedule and in-laws visiting, I didn’t want to have to wake up at like 5 AM to drive the 40 miles to my dad’s facility to pick him up, and then weather the teeth of Atlanta morning traffic to get back 40 miles, I opted to just hail an Uber for my dad, and bring him to my side of town, and then we could go to graduation, and either I drive him back, or I send him home in another Uber. 

We’re adults, and we throw money at obstacles.

I call him at 7 AM, to find out if he’s ready to go, and naturally he doesn’t pick up his phone because communication with my dad is basically a one-way street where he will blow up my phone whenever he wants to ask me a question that I’ve already answered for him at least 15 times previously, but when I need to get in touch with him, he never fucking picks up the phone, and I can usually expect to get a callback in a minute or two, like he’s a fucking ER doctor being paged.

Anyway, when he calls back, I ask him if he’s ready to go, and he says he wants to have breakfast first, which is a fair accommodation, his place has set meal hours, and he’s entitled to get his meals.  I tell him to call me when he’s done eating, and I’ll hail an Uber and let him know the make and color of the car, like we’d been doing for rides to church the last few Sundays, and he gives me an affirmative.

20-25 minutes later, I call him back because now I’m sweating the time, because if he doesn’t get into an Uber soon, he’ll definitely already be in morning traffic, but there would be no guarantee that he’d make it to my side of town in time to make it to the graduation, which I would later discover security was following rules to a T, and basically barring anyone who didn’t check in prior to 10 AM, wasn’t getting in.

My dad basically tells me that he doesn’t want to come, that it’s too far, too long of a car ride, and he actually wasn’t planning on coming.  Immediately, my mind quips that in one hand, I’m actually pretty relieved that he’s bailing, because this means I won’t have to babysit him all morning and afternoon, and seeing as how I was skirting work for the day, I would have my job to tend to, as well as the want to do certain errands, such as vote and go help mythical wife with another errand.

I don’t make a big deal about his abrupt bailing because of the relief at not having to babysit him, but subsequently, my mind started unpacking the underlying messages of his decision, and as pretty much is the case with everything my dad does to me, it began to aggravate the piss out of me.

I had reminded my dad well in advance of this date, and at no point did he ever express any sort of lack of want to come to my daughter’s graduation.  I made him write it down on his white board in his own handwriting, because I believe that even those with deteriorating recollection, if they see things written in their own hand, they’re more apt to be able to recall it.  So it’s not like he didn’t know this was coming, and he waited until the eleventh hour and 59th minute to bail on me, which in most cases, wars have been started for less offensive acts.

Continue reading “Ironically, I asked for this” →

Why do people like Twizzlers?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Honest question.  Mythical wife bought this huge fucking sack of them, and they’re sitting on the kitchen counter.  The kids want them every time they see them, and much like a lot of the junk food that mythical wife buys, she barely eats it, so either I eat more of it than I should, the kids eat more of it then they should, or it ultimately gets thrown out.

Needless to say, I’ve had like two ropes of the crap, and each time I take a bite, I ask myself, why do people like Twizzlers?  They’re basically barely edible plastic, hardly have any flavor, and I feel that they’re more effort to eat than they are to enjoy, as if anyone could actually enjoy these shitty things that feel like you’re biting into a candle, with about as much flavor.  I imagine that they’re like the human equivalent of Greenies treats for dogs, because they look like plastic, are minimally edible, and when they break down in your mouth, I imagine the effect is the same, where they passively scrape and inadvertently clean your teeth.

In all fairness, I’m talking about the traditional twists variants, because I’ve found that the pull ‘n peel Twizzlers are actually enjoyable and tasty, but as far as brand recognition goes, it’s all about the traditional twists.  And the question remains, why the fuck do people actually like these things?

As I said, the bag has been laying, mostly open, on my kitchen counter.  Usually, I try to be cognizant of any food that’s left out on the counter, because once everyone goes to bed at night, the cats in my house definitely like to get up onto the counters to snoop around and look for anything remotely edible.  And yet night after night, the Twizzlers remain completely untouched by the cats.  Just a day ago, an errant bag of cereal that was left on the counter fell victim to the fucking cats, and I found it on the ground the following morning, with it shredded open in the middle like it had been caught by velociraptors.

So the dumbass cats in my house won’t eat these shitty Twizzlers, but my wife argues with me that they’re remotely supposed to be good.  I do not understand how any people think these are remotely as good as to warrant their continued survival in the junk food space.

Make it make sense pls

#TRYHARDSZN2025: the transparency is refreshing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

FOX29: Bensalem teenager accepted into five Ivy League schools

I know I said I probably wasn’t going to be doing any more of these posts without just cause, but this one caught my attention due to the amount of transparency that was provided in the details, that I’m more likely to believe than I would have some of the other Ivy League #TRYHARDs.

This isn’t a story about how a #TRYHARD got the Ivy Sweep and got into all eight of the Ivies, but instead a story about how a kid had (supposedly) applied to seven of the Ivies, and gotten into five of them.  Two were waitlists, but the fact of the matter is that there were zero rejections among them all, which on paper sounds like a tremendous coup.

Now I don’t necessarily believe why someone would apply to just seven Ivies and leave one off, and in the case of this #TRYHARD, the one left out Ivy is Princeton, which means they’re lying and they applied to all eight, or for whatever specific reason, they have reason to beef with, and not apply to Princeton.

However the point remains that although she’s waitlisted to Harvard, she did get into Yale, which means even an Asian parent could find some solace in that monumental win, and on top of that, still got accepted into Columbia, Cornell, Brown and Penn, which are just the cherries on top for parental bragging rights.

Either way, the reason I felt some compulsion to write about this story is the fact that it hasn’t been outright fluffed to the point where they proclaimed that they got into five out of five Ivies, and actually have disclosed that they didn’t get into some of them.  A waitlist isn’t necessarily a rejection, but I’ve always been under the impression that it’s basically like 66% a no, since these are schools that are waiting on other #TRYHARDs to make a choice, and if they get bypassed, then they hit the waitlist and pull from there. 

And seeing as how with the Ivies, it’s probably nothing but other #TRYHARDs in all the pools of acceptances, waitlists and rejections, along with their absurdly low acceptance rates, I’m going to go ahead and say that those waitlists are basically no.  But seeing as how this #TRYHARD has already declared leaning towards Yale, it’s not like it really matters that she’s getting the axe from Harvard and Dartmouth, and might as well keep on saying fuck Princeton.

Netflix’s Wednesday: kind of like Harry Potter without the stink of Rowling’s bigotry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the stills came out for Netflix’s Wednesday, I didn’t realize that it was a show primarily about Wednesday.  I couldn’t get over Luis Guzman as Gomez Addams, and I figured this was just a reboot reimagining of The Addams Family.  Regardless, the premise seemed intriguing and I had made a note to catch Wednesday when it dropped.

Having finished the show, I can say that it was overall a fun season of television, that blended nostalgia, a clever plot and pace that gave just enough hints to make you think you know what’s going on, but also so many hints that it makes it difficult to narrow the who done it of the story.

It was also interesting that the show basically takes a property of most of its target audience’s childhoods, which was always campy, but giving it a much more of a push into an adult territory.  As much as the old Addams Family show and movies talked about blood and violence, it was rare that any was actually seen, but that’s hardly the case with Wednesday, which isn’t shy at all about showing both.  In a way, it’s kind of like Riverdale, re-telling Archie comics, but way darker and more grown-up storyline.

The casting of the show was fantastic, and aside from my fascination with Luis Guzman being Gomez, I think the cast was done well, from all of the Addams to all of the core students that we’re supposed to become invested in.  Naturally, the show is centralized around Wednesday, and I had no idea who Jenna Ortega was before this, but I’m sure she’s become quite the household name after this show.  I think she did an incredible job of portraying and evolving Wednesday’s character light years beyond the most popular rendition of Wednesday most people remember from Addams Family Values.

And of course it was fun to try and count how many times she actually blinks in the show.  I’ve heard no number higher than seven.

Atmospherically, the show feels like Harry Potter in setting, but like the title of the post goes, it’s better that it’s not, because JK Rowling is kind of cancelled and it’s nice to have something that feels like Harry Potter without having to be it.  All the way down to the borrowed plot device that was originally lifted from Castlevania II.

The funny thing about the show to me is the fact that the general plot and story of it didn’t actually have to be skinned with the Addams Family franchise at all.  Change all the names of the characters and remove all Addams IP, and it would stand alone.  Obviously it’s done to give it immediate credibility and ease the need for buzz, but I’m just saying I feel that a show called Friday and featuring equivalent characters with different names would probably be just as enjoyable.

Overall, it’s a fun and enjoyable show that has a lot of variety of appeal.  It’s nostalgia, it’s clever, well acted, and has a pace that doesn’t drag and has an easy to follow linear plot that it’s funny to play guess who as the episodes progress.

I’m sure future seasons will be in the works if they’re not already renewed at this point, and I think it has the makings of one of Netflix’s more substantial wins over the last few years.

Imagine if your existence was to one day become a chip?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw this bag of effectively, chicken chips at Sprouts, and I had to stop and examine the bag.  10 grams of protein from chips?  Servings per bag, two?  So I could effectively get 20g’s of protein by crushing this bag of chips made from chickens? 

But then I was like mehhhhhhh because I had no idea what to expect from a taste and consistency standpoint of chips made out of chickens.

But then I had to pass by the display again on the way to the register and they were 2/$7 and next thing I knew, I had bought two bags.  The other one is chili lime.

Honestly, they’re not that bad.  Crunchy like a potato chip, and frankly they taste kind of like Pringles.  And I get 20g’s of protein, which is always important to people who exercise and lift weights.

Really though, what I really thought about, and what served as the impetus for this post, was the sheer thought that a chicken, a living, bleeding bird, was somehow reduced to becoming, a chip.  Not a potato, not corn, not some other vegetable.  A chicken.

And then I got to thinking about what humans would feel like if we were ever overtaken by a more intelligent species that also was higher on the food chain than we were, and decided to one day reduce humans as a food source to not just any food, but chips.  Like I imagine a person getting one of those cheese slicers taken to them to carve out thin, malleable slices of their flesh, and they’re deep fried to become chips for creatures who eat people want to eat.

Fucked up to think about sure, but this is what my mind wandered off to while I was indulging in chips made out of chicken.  Better them than us, I suppose.

Ken Masters, Street Fighter canon and divorce in fiction

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I remember making a post about how Ken Masters in Street Fighter V was clearly on the back half of his prime, and was at the stage in his life where he was wearing compression shirts to help hide his deteriorating physique, a natural occurrence with the passage of time.  And as much of a Ken main that I’ve been in my own experience playing Street Fighter games throughout my life, it was an awkward but still mostly a yeah ok whatever thing, because it was still a fictional character in a video game.  But it didn’t change the perception for me that Ken was being slightly disrespected in the grand spectrum of the franchise’s history.

Many years later, no real thought given, but with the impending release of Street Fighter 6 (and it’s shitty logo), some gameplay footage has apparently been leaked, and among it, some visuals of what Ken Masters is up to in SF6.  Long story short, the once famous and handsome and suave and cool US champion of some title of fighting, in SF6, has become a shell of his former self.  His wife has left him and taken their child, and supposedly the story of Ken is that he’s on the pursuit of trying to be just like Ryu, which is the best fighter on the planet.

But apparently he also has decided to be a homeless man just like Ryu, and has apparently hit bottom in terms of appearance and attire, which is kind of hilarious because now he’s basically turned into the Mark of the Garou rendition of Terry Bogard, which may or may not be a deliberate dig at SNK, that hobo Ken Masters is basically the greatest SNK fighting game protagonist of the 90’s.

And that’s about as far as we’re going to go with analyzing the storyline because when the day is over I really don’t give two more shits as much as this is just something that piqued my interest and inspired some words to manifest onto a post.  But my reactions to this character development are:

  • Ken Masters has decided to become a homeless bum just like Ryu; in the name of trying to be the best fighter in the world, but still homeless all the same.
  • Eliza, his ex-wife, is apparently the sister to Guile which is completely new information to me, and makes me wonder just when the hell this was written into the series canon, because the two characters have had basically no unique interaction throughout the first ten years of the series since Guile debuted in SF2.
  • Street Fighter canon writing has apparently gotten really dark, and not in the sense that people are dying and bad guys are succeeding at taking over the world, but its characters are being dealt some too real and life-fucking circumstances like divorce and separation from children

Obviously, I’ve been living in a bubble under a rock over the last few years, so series canon has passed me like a bullet train, but I get the impression that SF lore is kind of starting to get as wild and written on the fly as Mortal Kombat lore is.  Maybe not so outlandish to where they’re retconning all sorts of joke characters as core characters or merging franchises in order to boost their character counts, but when you’re going as far as to deliberately deconstruct characters like having Ken go through a divorce and becoming a hobo, that’s some pretty wild development.

Then my train of thought departed from solely Street Fighter, but just on the thought of why it seems like divorces and other breakups seem to keep happening to fictional properties.  I chatted it out with a group chat of confidants and realized that I was answering my own question, but it doesn’t make it any less sad to those of us in a generation or minded like one as mine is, to see these fictional breakups.

Peter Parker and Mary Jane.  Homer and Marge Simpson.  Kermit and Miss Piggy.  Ken and Eliza Masters.  All these fictional couples had loving, lasting, strong relationships, but as time has progressed, the world becoming more cynical, people needing reassurance that they can be related to and aren’t alone, even these are not safe from being dismantled in order to, try and be an ally.

Because that’s really what it seems to be all about, showing the watching world, that anyone and everyone is capable of break-ups and divorces, and for those children of parents who go through it, that they are not alone.

I understand that it is important to be allies, but damn it, I’m seeing iconic relationships of my childhood being systematically dismantled in order to hitch their carts to helping, and it’s no less sad, even if there are important lessons to be taught and imparted by doing such.  It’s exasperating and depressing all the same.

Fiction is where people come to escape how shitty the real world actually is, but apparently even fiction is not safe from the heavy hands of reality, to where it has to be altered and mutated into content that can help people who just wanted to get away from it in the first place.

One year later (the not-so good one)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was just days after my child was born.  As she was premature, she was immediately admitted to the NICU, and it was heartbreaking to leave the hospital without our daughter coming home with us, but we tried to take comfort in the fact that she was exactly where she needed to be in order to play some physical catchup to where she would be allowed to come home.

Every single day afterward, mythical wife and I would go to the hospital twice a day to spend some time with our child.  Except for those first few days, I didn’t go, because I had come down with a pretty nasty cough, and given the situation that was rapidly spreading across the globe, understandably, there were some major red flags about an Asian guy having a cough, especially not just at a hospital, but at a NICU.

Fortunately, it was most likely just allergy-related, as like a true genius, I had participated in a double 5K event that involved running two 5Ks in an eight hour span; one at 1 am, and then one at 7 am the following (same) morning; it was daylight-savings themed, and the novelty of it alone made me want to try it.  But in doing so, I had inhaled a metric fuckton of early Georgia spring pollen, and my body was revolting as a result.  However, it cleared up fairly quickly, as the pollen coursed through my system, and I would get to go into the NICU later on.

However, it was on one of those days in which I dropped mythical wife off at the NICU, and came back home to log into work, I have a memory of swinging by the nearby Publix on the way home, and knowing we were low on bottled water, I made a point to pick up some more.  There was a display upon entering for a buy 2, get 1 free, so I figured, why not just get three cases?  With this whole pandemic thing starting to gain momentum, I figured three cases of water between two adults should be sufficient for all this shit to blow over, right?

Funny how perceptions are when you’ve never really lived through a global pandemic in your life.

So here we are, one year later; people with brains larger than a pea, are still wearing masks out in public, if they’re even leaving home in the first place, and coronavirus has officially killed over half a million Americans, and countless many more over the rest of the globe, but pretty much nowhere worse than it was in America.  Several vaccines have finally come to light, but the distribution of them leaves a lot to be desired, considering an entire planet’s population all need it in order to hopefully return to some semblance of normalcy, so in spite of the supposed cure existing, it’s still a slow and still dangerous path to the finish line.

Continue reading “One year later (the not-so good one)” →