Tag: fail

I’m sorry, but this was one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a long time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Source: kid in China gets spinning helicopter kicked in the lower abdomen region by robot performing a martial arts demonstration

I know it’s in poor taste to laugh at the painful expense of another person, much less a child, but I can’t help it.  This is legit one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t stop myself from busting out laughing every time I see it. 

I know my tune would do a 630 if the victim in question were one of my kids, but I like to think that even in time, I would see the humor in it and eventually find it funny, because it really is that entertaining to me.

Straight up Homer Simpson cracking up at Hans Moleman’s football in the nuts video vibes here.

But it’s just so entertaining, to the point where when you’re watching it for the 10th and 20th times, you begin to dissect everything about it, from the ridiculous blue afro wig that the robot is wearing, to the fact that in spite of a child getting hurt, everyone is laughing about it, and pretty much nobody is seen giving one iota of effort to check in on the child, who is doubled over, and falls out of the crowd in discomfort.  I’m hoping that in the seconds after the video is cut off, the robot, which has returned to its starting point, bowed to the audience.

And because it’s in China, you know almost nobody will help the kid, because it’s expected that parents take care of their own, but in a lot of Little Emperor culture, lots of kids are borderline feral at the lack of hands-on parenting they receive, to where they end up in scenarios like this, unsupervised and in potential danger.

I mean, you can kind of see the imaginary border that onlookers were adhering to, in order to give the martial arts robot some space to operate.  And the kid that got decked, was well past the border, and kind of got what he deserved for being in the line of fire.  In fact, the boy behind the victim was probably relieved that pink shirt got the boot, because he definitely would have caught it otherwise, because robots are clearly as shitty martial artists that McDojo-trained kids are, and was nowhere close to a full rotation before swinging that kick out.

Needless to say, let this be a painful lesson to this little emperor for neglecting to stay out of the way and prioritizing his desire to see something stupid over his own physical safety.  He will undoubtedly become scarred by this incident, and hopefully become an opponent over the excessively aggressive advancement of AI and robotics.

It would be funny if in 24 years, we learn of some activist in China who is spearheading some group or organization that is generally in opposition to robots and AI, and explains that it all started with a sunny afternoon in Xinjiang, where he got helicopter kicked by a ill-programmed robot.

Anytime I read about the environmental effects of AI

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think about this snippet from the epilogue of The Big Short detailing Michael Burry’s lone investing focus.  Back in 2015 when the film was released, I didn’t really think about what was really implied by Burry’s decision to start betting on water, but I could imagine reasons similar to what happened in Flint, Michigan, or the fact that in spite of the world being like 90% water, I don’t imagine even close to a tenth of that is drinkable water, and clean water is probably going to be a bigger commodity in the future than it really sounds like it should be.

But with all the chatter about the growth of AI, and how a single ChatGPT query results in the consumption of energy that is capable of requiring like a gallon of water to cool down some servers in a data center in the middle of bumfuck flyover America, this is what makes me wonder if Burry knew something was on the horizon or something a decade ago.

Either way, every time something comes out about the environmental ravaging AI is capable of, this is the image that comes directly to mind, and I find myself thinking about this more and more as AI is blabbed about more and moar.

lol MARTA #437

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AJC: (Paywall, but headline tells the story) Days away from the start of the FIFA World Cup, the new, state-of-the-art MARTA trains of tomorrow have not passed mandatory safety tests, and remains possible that they will not be ready for the largest sporting event in the world

There’s really not a whole lot to add to this story.  I figure to most people who live in the Atlanta area and are familiar with MARTA’s history, this is pretty much the least surprising thing in the world that Atlanta and MARTA fumbled the bag and in all likelihood won’t be ready for the World Cup despite having years to get shit done.

Progress in Atlanta moves at a snail’s pace, and frankly the metaphor is an insult to the speed of snails across the planet, because Atlanta routinely falls short of expectations unless there are millions of dollars in a treasure chest at the end of a rainbow to incentivize expediency, like when they miraculously rebuild I-85 three weeks ahead of schedule, which was still about like six weeks slower than the time it took Fukuoka, Japan to repair a sinkhole the size of a crater in a weekend.

I vaguely remember a similar situation way back when the College Football National Championship was being hosted in Atlanta, the city really wanted to get the Atlanta Streetcar up and running, mostly for appearances on a national level, because the little ass street car wasn’t going to be realistically moving more than a few hundred people for an event the size of the Natty.

But they failed, and didn’t complete it on time, and when they did finally get it up and operational, nobody cared, nobody rode it, and it’s about as much of an afterthought to the city as much as the Dallas Austin-produced ATL Anthem that was supposed to be the city’s song, akin to Sinatra singing New York, New York, but still cost taxpayers around $5M to make.

So it’s not the surprise of the century that Atlanta and MARTA are on a one-way crash course to yet another failure, and more than likely won’t have the purported trains of the future ready in time for the World Cup.  And even if they did miraculously pull off the impossible, there’s no way that they would have passed the mandatory safety checks and requirements, and I could see a situation where a shiny new Cerberus-looking train car, packed to the gills full of Spaniards* and the motherfucker goes off the rails and causes some tragic accident.

*I double-checked Atlanta’s guaranteed match list, and holy fuck did we get the shaft on country draw, where Spain is pretty much the only powerhouse country playing here, with the rest of the field being Czechia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Haiti, Cabo Verde (?), and Congo; I didn’t even know many of these places even had national teams, much less ones good enough to qualify for the World Cup

Alternatively, once the festivities begin, futbol fans will be subjected to the old and busted, urine-smelling incumbent trains, where local bums and panhandlers are probably rubbing their hands together at the opportunity to grief and harass riders from various other parts of the world, who just want to get to Mercedes-Benz Arena (that’s not allowed to have their own logo in sight, lmao).

Either way, I heard that thanks to the political situation in ‘Murica, there was a lot of reconsideration of would-be fans, travelers and futbol enthusiasts, as far as hotels, tickets and the promised influx of money that an event the caliber of the World Cup is capable of bringing in, and I thought to myself, even if Korea isn’t going to get a match here, it might still be a cool thing to go to a World Cup match, and maybe even take my dad with me.  But then I discovered that the duration of the entire Group Stage, I will be out of the country, and by the time I get back, will be only critical knockout futbol matches, where the cost of those tickets will probably be back up to $FuckYou.99/each.

Perhaps I might luck into some watch events in Seoul for when Korea takes the pitch, I can’t imagine that even remote, they could be any less chaotically disorganized as Atlanta and MARTA are.  But thank goodness I won’t be around in the city for when the World Cup will inevitably be causing all sorts of chaos around town, and no thanks to MARTA.

The whitest problem since desegregation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: City of Alpharetta proposing ordinance to provide residents relief from pickleball noise

Imagine the shit-eating grin on my face when I read just the headline of this article, and immediately trying to think of the words to best ironically describe the inhumanity of pickleball noise, ruining the lives of residents in Alpharetta, a lily-white suburb 30-80 minutes away from actual City of Atlanta, depending on the traffic.

I mean, there’s really not much to add, the headline does a pretty succinct job of painting the picture of the problem that is about as peak white people problems since Bad Bunny performing at the halftime show at the Super Bowl.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve posted specifically about Alpharetta; a few years back, there was a situation where residents got really salty about a change in policy that meant that they weren’t allowed to fly Confederate flags during a Veteran’s Day Parade, so the city opted to just cancel the parade outright.

Even in the year, two thousand and twenty-six, shit like this actually is, written and reported on.

Still though, it’s entertaining to me that pickleball is about as white people sport as lacrosse and calling cops on colored folks, but it’s gotten so overly popular to the point where the goofy-ass sounds of pickleballs getting whacked have turned heel on the people that brought them into existence, and instead of trying to fix the game, white people are doing what white people do best – try and transmogrify the laws to where they can deal with the issue while avoiding any conflict at all.

The black sheep (family) of the family

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

All while growing up, I often thought to myself that I was the obvious black sheep of my family.  Not just because I was a little edgelord growing up, but just the fact that just in general I was always kind of off from the general consensus of everyone else, primarily my cousins, for whom it was like our entire generation was always measured and compared amongst one another, in a very typical Korean way.

For starters, I’m the youngest among all of my cousins and my sister, and the age difference from me to the eldest in the generation was around 20 years.  My mom is the youngest of five sisters, which means I was the youngest kid from the youngest member of the generation before, not that age is the only thing that really matters.

Unlike some of the older cousins of mine, I wasn’t born and had lived some time in Korea, and it’s clear there’s a lot of Korean-isms that I just didn’t adopt as fervently as some others did in the family.  I grew up entirely American, with video games and comic books, and developed defiance and the want to be contrarian and just generally being a smartass.  I still had respect for my elders and most of the time looked up to my older cousins, but it was primarily because they all treated me well, and did not feel an automatic obligation to give them respect and reverence for no other reason than their age.

But it was clear that I was the weirdo of the family as I entered adolescence, with my pierced ears, colored hair, typical various 90s fashions.  All at time where many of my cousins were finishing college, some were already married, the next generation impending.

Eventually, I would not finish college, I’d move far the fuck away from my immediate family, and my choice in women was decidedly not Korean.  I still maintained decent relationships with those in my family, but it was distant, and not just in a physical sense.

Today, I still have good relationships with everyone, but it’s clear just how different of a position I am from everyone else.  Lots of their kids have just begun to graduate college or are basically young adults across the board.  My niece and nephew are on the younger side of the next generation, but they still have at least 8 years on my kids.

Seeing as how we’re all adults now, I don’t feel quite so black sheep-y around them, but the fact remains that I am very much not like a lot of my family members.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations over the phone with my sister lately, mostly venting about our parents; I have my dad as my third child these days, but my sister has been dealing with a lot of my mom’s own incapabilities these days, and her general reliance on others when it comes to things that adults of my generation are all expected to be able to handle on their own.

Long story short, I came to the realization that perhaps it wasn’t just so much that I’m the black sheep of the family, as much as my immediately family of my parents, my sister and I, are the black sheep family, of the rest of our family.

There are a lot of circumstances that exist solely within our immediate family unit, that don’t exist anywhere else, in either my mom’s side or my dad’s side of the family.  My sister is a widow, I live further away from the rest of my family than anyone else.  My dad has deteriorated into my third kid from a variety of reasons where a lot of my uncles and elder men my family are all still sharp, spry and capable adults.  My parents are the only divorced couple, and my mom is oft-reminding my sister and I that she’s the only mother among the fam whose children don’t live within 15 minutes away.

My dad had a shitty relationship with most of my aunts and uncles, and he’s basically the responsibility to my sister and I, primarily me due to proximity, and despite the fact that for decades, I’ve tried to tell him the importance of making and having friends and people in his life besides just his kids, but he’s so old thinking and set in his ways, that he is where he by no fault of anyone by himself.

My mom is the divorcee that basically got walked all over by my dad, but she was so desperate to get away from him that it was still worth it to her in the end.  But she’s in this awkward position where she’s all along among her sisters, whose own adult children all live within the same county as they are, and is often this odd wheel that I’m sure she feels self-conscious about, but my sister and I aren’t going to pick up our lives and move back to Virginia solely so she can feel good about herself.

As a result, my mom ends up leveraging a lot of assistance from our cousins, and my sister and I feel like we can sense the general annoyance and resentment from them, when they have to help out our mom because they’re close and local, but it’s not like we can always do things from afar.  My mom shoulders some responsibility for needing so much assistance too, because not unlike so many elder Koreans, they simply hit a ceiling in which they stop wanting to learn how to do things and generally function without needing people to hold their hand.

So ultimately, it’s not just me being the weirdo of the family here, because it’s evident when I talk about it and write it all out, that it’s not just me, but my immediate family that all seems to have a lot of baggage that nobody else does.  Why this matters is that my sister and I are often given a lot of unsolicited advice from other family members who can’t relate to our circumstances, and their opinions only hold so much weight.  As is often spoken out there in the world, you just never know what kind of battles every individual is going through, and in the case of my sister and I, nobody in our extended families can really relate to what we’re going through, and not getting any grief for the things they may or may not get drafted into doing in the name of family, would greatly be appreciated.

It’s like the intention to lose is deliberate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

PBS: former Atlanta mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms wins Democratic nomination for Georgia governor

Before I went to my voting location, mythical wife and I were talking about how the State of Georgia was at it again, with Governor Yosemite Sam signing HB369, which long story short, basically hides political affiliations for those who choose to vote non-partisan, basically to intentionally create confusion and ambiguity so that people might accidentally vote for the wrong candidates.  Obviously designed to help Republicans in the bluer parts of the state, but just another means of capitalizing on the less intelligent whose votes count the same as those with higher IQs.

There was a part of me that considered picking a Republican ballot and trying to monkey around with their results, as if there weren’t going to be tens of thousands of brainless orange worshippers who wouldn’t offset my tampering, but at least I could tell myself if by supporting Brad Raffensperger, he’s a guy that seems to have a modicum of integrity in a toxic wasteland of politico.

But mainly because the Democrats of Georgia’s play was known and in my opinion a terrible idea, and it makes me think that they’re either really that arrogant and stupid, or that they’re secretly on the payroll of the Georgia GOP to just keep doing the same dumb shit over and over again and pretend like there’s any hope.

It was pretty well known that Keisha was going to get the Democratic bid for governor, and much like the last two Governor elections, it’s basically going to be another win for the red team, but way easier this time around, and it makes me think about the cliché seen above about the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

For the third time in a row, Georgia Dems are trotting out a black woman to go for governor, and not that I don’t think a black woman would be capable of handling the role of the position, the Dems here seem to forget that they’re in Georgia, which is a state that historically has not been particularly friendly to both black people and women.

Furthermore, Keisha Lance Bottoms is no Stacey Abrams, and she lost twice.  Stacey was a respected, tenacious bureaucrat who actually did shit that mattered, like launching Fair Fight to try and aid in voter suppression.  Stacey was generally liked by all Democrats, black and white and everyone else, and her first run for governor, although was still an L, was the closest margin the Democrats had gotten in like the last 4-5 elections.

Keisha on the other hand, has had a maligned career as the Mayor of Atlanta, often seen as handpicked stooge successor to notorious clown Hizzoner Kasim Reed, who himself was revealed to have flagrantly blazed through mountains of taxpayer dollars on his own indulgences while Mayor of the Atlanta.  Keisha constantly put herself at odds with the orange shithead, and there was one particular incident I always remembered, when she basically tried to legalize street racing to a degree, and the implication was that her son was most likely involved in doing it, and it’s like she was trying to preemptively change the law so her son wouldn’t get in too deep of shit if he were to inevitably get caught.

The bottom line is, Keisha put herself into a position where not only will she not have the vote of white people, especially those who favor the color orange, but she was not liked by large swaths of the black community, who simply thought she just wasn’t doing a good job as Mayor of Atlanta, so why would they even bother putting forth the effort to vote her into the governor’s mansion?

Like, I can practically hear Sweet Georgia Brown playing on election day when voters hit the polls, and vote after vote is cast for whomever wins the Republican runoff, because it really doesn’t matter who emerges for the GOP, they’re going to stomp a hole in Keisha.  And after the election, when voter numbers emerge, I anticipate there being a really poor black turnout, because like I said, as much as there may be those who don’t like the color orange, but they don’t like the alternative enough to feel it’s worth leaving the house to vote for it.

If it were up to me, Georgia Dems should take a step back and try to get just one wishlist category a W; either push a black man, or a woman, but just stop trying to get a two-for-one, because fringe Georgia voters are way too racist and way too sexist to vote in a black woman.

And if they try again in 2030, insanity will be definitely confirmed and reinforced.

I bet this never happens at a Canadian Timmy’s

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYPost: altercation at an Indiana Tim Horton’s over an argument about a drive-thru order results in a 75-year old woman dead

I’d be curious to know what exactly happened in this scenario to where things escalated to physical violence.  I’ve had my share of fast food fuckups, and even if I cared enough to expend the effort to try and get it rectified, I can’t say I’ve had a low success rate at some sort of resolution.

It’s like, just remaining calm and not being a dick seems to a good enough strategy at achieving some sort of recompense, so I can’t help but wonder what happened at this Indiana Tim Horton’s, where an irate 75-year old woman marched into the restaurant, got in the grill of a 17-year old drive thru worker before their 20-year old manager intervened, to where things escalated even further, to where it became physical.

Tim Horton’s iced capps are definitely on my Rushmore of fast food items, but fuck if I’m going to risk my life if someone there possibly fucked up my order.

Watching the video, it’s scary and unfortunate to see the escalation of a conflict get physical, and to the point where death entered the chat, because there is seldom anything funny about the loss of life.

In one hand, I can’t help but feel inclined to side with the restaurant, because the elderly woman did march in there and seem to aggress with minimal restraint.  And when things get physical, people have the right to defend themselves.  But in the other hand, it was a 75-year old woman; obviously most of us probably aren’t experts at hand-to-hand combat with 75-year olds, but how hard could she have hit to incense a 20-year old to fight back with such fierceness?

Either way, it’s a scenario where everyone involved loses.  A woman lost her life, the employee that fought her will probably need therapy for the rest of their life knowing that their actions contributed towards it, and Tim Horton’s name gets dragged down into the muck by having a customer death controversy tied to their brand.

Plus, the daughter of the deceased takes some shrapnel for getting quoted sounding like a dumbass:

You should not enter a coffee shop for a coffee and a doughnut and come out unalived. That is diabolical,”

Really, unalived?  I’d ask, what are they, 13?  But it’s the daughter of a 75-year old, so presumably someone closer to my age than someone who probably actually thinks unalived is a real word.

Like the title of this post says, I can’t imagine something like this ever happening up in Canada, because Canadians are typically way more well-mannered and not as violent as their southern neighbors, and hopefully incidents like this doesn’t inhibit the expansion of Timmy’s in the US, because we’ve finally got remotely accessible locations in Georgia, and I hope to always be able to get iced capps when I really am in the mood for them.