Feeling despair, vol. #1,256

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, my kids have both decided that they really like the lullaby tune playing on their Hatches while they go to sleep.  It’s the sweetest tune that everyone knows, but when I listen to it playing on the monitor coming from both their rooms, it takes me back to the days when they were but little nuggets of babies, and it absolutely melts my heart, reminiscing of those days.  I do not deny the feeling of tears welling up from time to time when I think about it.

I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately, and I’m having a hard time getting out of it.  Times like this, there’s really little else but for me to try to put it down in writing to see if it helps me process and figure things out which sometimes happens when I put it all into actual words.

Also, it’s because I don’t really feel like there’s anyone I can speak with much these days, because everyone is understandably busy with their own lives and matters and everyone’s time is important to them, but it still doesn’t change the fact that I feel so utterly alone these days, but at the same time I’m so absolutely over feeling like I have to be the initiator of every single human interaction, be it with my own parents, my wife, colleagues or anyone else, that lately I just want to be left the fuck alone after all and not have to do absolutely anything.

But I guess that’s really what depression kind of is at the very root of things, feeling down about anything and everything, hoping someone will notice and offer to help out, but subsequently not wanting to deal with other people and their own personalized bullshit, so it’s just this kind of negative swirl in the brain where you think you know what you want until you realize it comes with some variables attached to them, things that you don’t want, so it’s maybe for the best that I’m just left alone, and then it just regurgitates over and over again until it’s time to go to bed and hope that you wake up not feeling so shitty about things.

What it all amounts to is a version of me that’s kind of going through the motions, where the mundane is the easiest part of the day in the sense that I don’t have to think about things too much, because my job is monotonous and obnoxiously busy, but I get to go to the gym there and I don’t know what things would be like for me if I didn’t exercise as much as I do.

I come home and try to make the absolute best of time I have with my kids, reading books, playing with Legos and other building toys, occasionally watching some television together, and both girls are currently in the midst of reading Harry Potter books, and they both seem to really like them, so it’s been a pleasure reading some long-form stories to them on a nightly basis.

They go to bed, begrudgingly, and not without tremendous resistance, and then dad-mode disengages, but then my house is a fucking disaster zone because everyone treats my home like a storage facility where nobody knows how to throw anything away and shit continues to accumulate within my walls, and bringing it up to anyone results in snappy rebuttals and nothing gets done, but I try to do my best at being really the only one who puts forth any fucking effort at straightening the place up, because I no longer have an office or any dedicated space to call my own where I can hide in and decompress, so I’m constantly trying to make the public areas of my home more to my liking, but that eats into the time I have available to me to not be dad.

I feel underappreciated and taken for granted by just about everyone in my life these days, and my kids are the only ones who really get a pass because they’re still just kids and don’t really understand such complexities of human behavior yet.  But whether I’m at home, or at work, I just feel very underappreciated and taken for granted, and it feeds into the perpetual cycle of being down on a daily basis, probably getting worse.

My medium at work is oft-overlooked and not at all taken into consideration by the decision makers of the company who are all so easily distracted by all things shiny and digital, but when the day is over, our retail locations would sure look like shit if they didn’t have people like me who put forth the work to give them any sort of visual identity.  Just this week, I’ve heard colleagues absent-mindedly proclaim their general ignorance for the work that my team and I do, and I’m just like, great, good to know that you’re not as qualified for the job you have despite probably saying you were, good times.

At home, I feel like a glorified housekeeper, seeing as how I’m the one who does the vast majority of any sort of house work, but the difference is that I’m not getting paid to do it, and in fact, my credit card debt is actually only getting worse after an expensive trip to Asia where I’m shouldering the brunt of the financial lift, and any sort of recompense is going to be slow, small, and generally inconsequential to the fact that I’m the one eating the interest on any balances carried over month to month.

Nobody respects my time, which makes me feel like nobody respects me, and with as limited time I have in order to do anything remotely close to being for myself, dwindles with every 5-10 minutes chunk that is burned by my kids not listening, or anyone else just not respecting me or my time.  Almost nothing in the world is a bigger pet peeve than my time getting wasted, I state it as clear as day, and people either ignore it, or consciously choose to not give a fuck, with neither being a particularly respectful decision.

Subsequently, my temper has been short, probably more than usual, because it just feels like nothing is easy, and nothing is really good right now.  The littlest tasks end up going tits up real fast, because wanting to do A, requires B, C and D to happen, but not before you move E, F and G out of the way so that H could be gotten.  I usually snap and curse the sheer amount of unnecessary crap that exists in my house, and my wife just assumes I have anger issues when she, or anyone else doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck enough about my state of being to try and find out what the problems are to see if they could possibly help.

No amount of break, trip or escape would be close to helping me out when I’m in this state of mind, because I know that if I were to be away from my house for even the smallest amount of time means coming home to a disaster zone, which is usually what happens whenever I do go away for like a weekend.  And then it’s usually worse than before I started because now I have to retroactively clean other peoples’ shit, which just ends up being a lose-all scenario.

My wife suggested I come down to a day of Dragon-con this weekend, and I don’t think I could have possibly shot that idea down any faster.  I have no ill-will towards the convention, or any of my friends or acquaintances that are looking forward to going.  But it is not something that I am at all interested in anymore at this juncture in my life, and I definitely am not remotely close to being in a mental state to where I could even fake it for a few hours, even if it means not seeing a lot of people that I think fondly of.

The con is just so different than it used to be, and I understand that that’s a me problem and not the con’s problem, but it’s no longer an event I can go to without an agenda, and wing it.  I used to say about conventions in the past, let the con come to you, but that’s a dated mentality that isn’t valid at conventions today, because everyone comes in with plans, agendas, and schedules, and old fucks like me without are usually left to just aimlessly wander, and hang out and hope to run into people they know, who usually can’t stop for more than a minute because they’ve got shit to do.

I’ve never felt lonelier at an event boasting 50,000+ people than I had at the last two Dragon-cons I’d been to.  I don’t really want to feel that way again any time soon, or spend the $2,000 that usually comes along with room, food, parking and booze.

Mythical wife has a purpose this year, and actual tasks to do, and perhaps that’s something I could consider in the future if I ever felt the itch to ever go back to any convention ever again, but for this year, hard pass on Dragon-con.

Well, I can’t really say that feel that much better putting all of these thoughts down into text.  I don’t think I really have any true takeaways from all this swill that can help me process the depression I’m dealing with right now.  I’m trying to eat better and working in a two-a-day workout, usually some sort of 30-35 minute in the evenings that I’m sacrificing out of my scarce free time, in the sake of improving my health.

But I can appreciate myself in doing it at all, instead of intending on doing it, not doing it, and then getting anxious and upset about not doing it, to which it then becomes an Inception-like layer of angst in which to fuel a future rant.  And I guess that in itself is somewhat of a pyrrhic W, and these days I have to take any wins that I can get.

Justice for Johnny Tran

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whenever there’s any news story about any carjackings or truck heists on social media, often times I always like to drop a photo comment of Johnny Tran accusing Dom Toretto of narc-ing on him from The Fast and the Furious.  Context notwithstanding, it’s always funny (to me) that it’s just a picture of jacked Rick Yune pointing at jacked Vin Diesel captioned with IT WAS YOU.

Anyway, I was sitting in a boring-ass work meeting when I discreetly did this again while dicking around on my phone, but my mind began to wander about Johnny Tran in general.  And the more I thought about his character, in the grand spectrum of the entire Fast Universe, it occurred to me that not only did the series leave a gargantuan boatload of money on the table for not following up with Johnny Tran and his apparent Triad-like syndicate lurking in the shadows behind him, when the day was over Johnny Tran was one of the least-criminal offenders in the series and that he basically died (spoiler alert) for nothing, and there was absolutely no retribution for his murder.

I mean throughout the rest of the series, wars have been started over lesser beefs and conflicts, but somehow in the Fast Universe the story of Johnny Tran is immediately swept under the rug and upon realizing this, I cannot stand for it.

Yes, Johnny Tran wasn’t a squeaky clean boy scout by any means necessary; he liked to roll around with his cousin Lance and his posse in his Honda 2000 or on superbikes, and often seemed to be packing automatic weapons, trying to intimidate opps, but come on, the man was living in Southern California GTA turf war zones, man sometimes has to do what he has to in order to protect himself.

But as the backstory goes, his and Dom’s beef started over “a business deal gone bad” not to mention the fact that Dom had slept with his sister – AKA disrespecting his Family.  Sure, he shot up Brian’s Eclipse and blew it up, but that’s because Dom had neglectfully allowed him and Brian to wander into Tran’s hood, and rules are rules and consequences for breaking them are justifiable.

And then Brian sic’d the feds on Tran and his crew, because the irony was that he was in fact, clouded by Mia and Dom and didn’t want to believe that they were the Civic crew hijacking trucks, and saw them as the best patsies to take the fall.  At this point, Tran had done other than blowing up the Eclipse and some intense coercion to Ted at Harry’s for some SR20 motors a week before Race Wars that should fetch a pretty penny. 

The DVD players that Brian saw in his garage were legit, and the reality was that the only dirt on Tran and his crew were petty weapons charges and some speeding tickets, yet the response to Brian’s bullshit intel were humiliating raids on Little Saigon to bust Lance while he’s just trying to enjoy some pho with his homies, and the feds breaking and entering Johnny Tran’s home to falsely arrest him, culminating with the ultimate indignity for any self-respecting Asian child, getting the taste slapped out of him by their own father.

I mean, watch the clip; Asian dads rarely show urgency or rush any form of punishing, knowing that the anticipation and the wait for punishment is almost as bad as the physical act.  But Johnny Tran’s dad fucking ran to the front door in order to get in that denigrating slap, all while Johnny Tran is being fucking held by the cops. 

I don’t care what anyone else says, Johnny Tran getting shot and murdered is the second worst thing to happen to him, behind getting slapped by his own dad.  The fact that it was completely unwarranted and under false pretenses is irrelevant; had Johnny Tran actually lived, this is irreversible lifetime trauma that wouldn’t ever have gone away, and in fact it’s probably for the best that he died, because this moment right here is the impetus for Johnny Tran to become the villain the franchise wanted to him to become, and he would have overpowered every fucking sheik, corrupt Brazilian, Charlize Theron, Jason Momoa and God’s Eye with the fury of all of communist China* behind him.

*yes I know the character was Vietnamese, but the actor is Korean, driving a Japanese car, may as well muck up the entire Asian pool at this point, not like it hasn’t already been done to this point

Make no mistake, none of this happens if Brian doesn’t narc on Johnny Tran, because he’s too clouded by Mia’s hoo-hah, and it’s actually incredible that retribution doesn’t come more immediately, and that JT doesn’t boil over until everyone’s at Race Wars.

Of course, speaking of Race Wars, this is really the catalyst for the culmination of Johnny Tran’s demise; after Johnny Tran easily defeats Jesse and his shitty Jetta, Jesse should have manned up, handed over the pink slip and everything is finished.  Instead, Jesse reneges on a gentleman’s agreement, flees the desert, forcing Johnny Tran to get up in his master’s face, which led to the accusations that Dom was a narc, triggering him into a violent rage, and looking back at the film, it’s hilarious that of all the different ways that Domonic Toretto is antagonized by other characters throughout the series, it’s accusing him of being a narc that gets him to flip out in such a maniacal manner.

And we all know what happens next; Dom’s crew biffs a hijacking, Vince nearly dies, Brian blows his cover, they all show back up at the Toretto house, where a terrified Jesse shows back up like the pussy we all know he is.  Johnny Tran and his cousin Lance show up and light everyone up, Jesse dies, Brian chases, Dom commits vehicular manslaughter** when he PITs Lance into a ravine, and Brian murders Johnny Tran when he shoots him in the back while he’s trying to flee on his bike, causing him to crash and expire on the streets, right outside of a homeless camp under a bridge.

**An easy plot twist that Lance didn’t die, since Fast characters have demonstrated the ability to survive way worse physical traumas than wiping out off of a cliff, but that just feeds the Johnny Tran (and his family) are victims narrative

It’s astounding to me that in spite of all of the callbacks throughout the entire Fast series, some stretching even harder than the litany of callbacks in Cobra Kai, there isn’t the slightest attempt to reach back to Johnny Tran, or his apparent syndicate of discreet criminals.  I mean Momoa’s flamboyant character is directly related to the events of Fast Five, and when the series pivoted to this Italian Job like heist genre, it’s been Dom’s Family versus, well the rest of the fucking world at this point, but at no point have they even tried to go back to Johnny Tran.

Considering the huge reach they did for the resurrection of Han, I like to think it would be hilarious if in Fast XV, they pulled the same shit and suddenly Johnny Tran never died after all.  But he, and possibly his cousin Lance, have been laying low in the weeds over the last quarter century, waiting for the best time to strike Dom and the Family.

But considering they haven’t tried at all in 25 years, it’s probably wishful thinking that we’ll ever see Johnny Tran ever again.

In an alternate world, Tran has his own Family, along with Lance and probably a diverse cast of equivalents to Letty, Mia (who Dom fucked), Vince, Jesse and Leon and later on revealed that Ja Rule was the Tej Parker equivalent, DK was his overseas colleague, and maybe like Batista and Clive Owen could have been his Hobbs and Shaw equivalents.

But we’ll never know for sure, because we live in a fucked up unfair world, and Johnny Tran did not get to have his story ever finished much less told. 

Johnny Tran was innocent.  Johnny Tran was murdered.  Johnny Tran was the victim all along.

Justice for Johnny Tran.

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.