Vaya con dios, [redacted location]

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that I’m a person of any importance in the world, but all the same, I’m generally intentionally vague when it comes to giving out too many specific details of my life.  I’m sure the internet is ripe with all sorts of information about me, my family, and people I associate with if anyone were so inclined to want to dig, but all the same I prefer to not give too much intel away willy-nilly.

That being said, my family just recently sold my dad’s place up in Virginia, which was a property that I lived in for about seven years, which makes me double take writing that out that I lived there for so short, in the grand spectrum of my life.  But I lived in that town, that county, for 13, which again seems short when I write that out, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that I spent my formative years up in Virginia, so for better or worse, the place will always hold somewhat of importance to me, regardless of how much I actually don’t really like it up there anymore, save for the fact that much of my family still resides there.

My sister made me realize however, that with my dad’s place sold, my family now no longer owns any property up there, as my mom’s gone the route of mercifully ditching homeownership, and opting to live out her remaining years renting in a home of convenience, which suits my sister and I fine, knowing she’ll be closer to family and living in a place that will take care of things for her instead of relying on her children to make a shit ton of calls and handle everything for her instead.

But the bottom line is that as far as one of our primary childhood towns are concerned, we now no longer have any reason at all to go there ever again.  I didn’t think of it, but it is still a tiny bit jarring to realize that, mostly from the standpoint that neither of us will really have a free place to stay whenever we visit in the future anymore, since my mom’s apartment is adequate for two people, tops, much less my entire family or my sister’s.  Maybe some cousins can harbor us, but the reality is that hotels may need to be leveraged in future visits.

Back to the point though, my sister was right, there’s absolutely no reason for us to ever really visit [redacted] again.  None of my family lives there anymore, my closest friends have all moved away from there, and short of my high school, and any former addresses that would show up if I were ever to need federal clearance again, there’s basically nothing left that ties me to [redacted] anymore.

As nostalgic as I may seem like I’m coming off, when the day is over, it doesn’t really matter much at all.  It’s just the tiniest of swan songs for a place that I haven’t lived in for more than half my life now, and melancholy me just wanting to get some words out about the topic before the recency bias of current events evaporates into the aether.  [Redacted] isn’t even my true hometown, just the place where I probably did the most growing up, and truth be it, I haven’t even really liked the last few times I’ve been up there.  The sprawl has gotten out of control, the infrastructure of the whole area has failed to keep up with the demand of population growth, and I often found myself growing frustrated with the lack of shit, terrible traffic, and the fact that it was one gigantic endless vanilla suburb.

And I hit a fucking deer, in a place where deer probably wouldn’t have been expected, but because of the sprawl and destrucity of nearby nature, the poor deer have little elsewhere to go, so now that I think about it [redacted] can go fuck itself, and good riddance to the place.

Without really even realizing it, I kind of had my swan song up there, the last time I was there, cleaning out all of my dad’s shit.  I drove around, ran around the old lake I used to run on, drove around some more, ate at a newer restaurant that had come into existence, visited my old 7-Eleven.  [Redacted] has changed tremendously from when I used to live there, and will continue to change and fill in all available space long after any traces of my family and I are gone, leaving nothing but memories.

Man, that wasn’t the direction I thought this post would go in when I thought about writing about it, but seems legit enough for me.  With my friends all gone, my family ties now being completely severed, there really is nothing left for me there except nostalgia.

Good riddance, [redacted], who knows when I’ll ever step foot there again.  I’m not much into the idea of high school reunions, and I have enough family and friends in the surrounding area to occupy me in the event I’m ever up adjacent to the area, and maybe when I’m much older and somehow more nostalgic, I’ll take my kids when they’re also older, to maybe take a walk or something around the old lake.

But of course, the Barves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BaseballWRLD: Braves’ shortstop Kim Ha-Seong is statistically basically having the worst baseball season in history

I really hate that it’s a Korean player, on the Atlanta Braves, that is having this unfortunate distinction, but the proof is in the pudding and the numbers don’t lie.  I know that all over the internet, there are couch statisticians and homers who are going to cry that ~85 plate appearances is too small a sample to make this kind of judgment, but those individuals probably aren’t really seeing the bigger picture, nor have they actually watched any Braves games in which Kim has actually been in this season.

Man has been the very definition of a free agent flop, and one more thing that sucks about this whole thing is that this is the kind of free agent signing example that will further make the Atlanta Braves corporation even more gun-shy and risk-averse skittish about free agent signings in the future, than they already are.  One-year pacts are pretty low-risk as they come, albeit at high price tags, but considering the return on investment Kim has provided, or didn’t, the $20M he is making in the 2026 season has been particularly brutal.

Like with most Korean players in MLB, I supported Kim and have been such, even when he signed with San Diego and was playing out there.  I was proud of the guy when he was putting up 5+ bWAR seasons for the Padres, with him being so good in 2023 he was even notching some low-end MVP votes and a Gold Glove. 

Injuries derailed his time in San Diego, and he was shipped off to Tampa Bay where he couldn’t ever get back on track, and I was really excited when the Rays made him available and the Braves being the Braves did the Braves-iest thing and managed to buy low on him, picking him up at the waiver-deadline last year, which is the second trade deadline, the one nobody ever talks about, because that’s the one that’s like C-rated CDOs and there’s rarely any notable talent ever exchanged.

And that initial gamble paid off, and fed into my hypothesis of how much playing environment matters, with Kim’s numbers improving noticeably going from Tampa to Atlanta.  It’s like going from sleepy Tampa with white trash and no Korean community to Atlanta, that sure, still has its share of white trash, but has a robust Korean community mattered, and across the board his counting stats all improved in roughly the same amount of plate appearances.

The union proved to be mutually beneficial enough to where the Braves actually spent money and spent money on a Scott Boras client, two things that the organization normally hasn’t done a lot of historically, but it was a good opportunity for the Braves to get a reliable shortstop, and a good opportunity for Kim to possibly flex a season of being healthy and playing in a good environment, which he could then hope to parlay into a larger, more lucrative deal, likely away from Atlanta afterward.

But then he just had to go to Korea in the offseason, where the winters can be brutal, he slipped on some ice and fell and fucked up his hand, and before even reporting to Spring Training, the Kim deal had already begun to go tits up.  He missed all of Spring Training, and it’s evident that the lack of preparation put him in a miserable place to play catchup with, and when he returned to the Major League squad, he was joining the team that was contending and facing real pressure, and Kim just couldn’t get going.  He was a black hole in the lineup, and it went from it’s too early to tell to okay, maybe he does suck now.

A setback that put him on the disabled list was kind of a convenient excuse to remove him from the roster and start getting some production from other players, and fans began to bemoan his inevitable return, because the Braves being the Braves always demand ROI, and they would undoubtedly be determined to recoup anything at all from the $20M they were paying him.

He hit well in his rehab assignment, which the team was milking to the absolute maximum to keep him out of the Majors, but when push came to shove and they were forced to bring him back up, they did the predictable thing and brought him back up, while releasing one of the guys who was filling in for him, and doing it better than he was.

But the fact that Kim can’t hit Major League pitching goes to show that this is probably where he realistically is now, as a player.  Capable of doing well against Triple-A talent, but unable to be competent in the Majors.  As much as I support Kim personally, the reality is that his MLB career is more than likely done after this season, and he’ll probably go back to Korea to where he can hopefully salvage a lucrative career out in the KBO.

Regardless, we’re back to square one, where Kim is still sucking, and sucking to the magnitude of being on track to having the literal worst offensive season in MLB history, no hyperbole.  bWAR is kind of a catch-all statistic, loosely used to measure player worth, and Kim is currently sitting on -1.0 bWAR, which doesn’t sound like that much considering there are guys with worse, but it’s the fact that he’s gotten there in much shorter time that shows just how bad and detrimental he has been. 

Google estimates the cost of one bWAR in 2026 is roughly $11M, so the fact that Kim is sitting on -1.0 bWAR, and is getting paid $20M to get there, his financial impact to the organization is -$31M dollars.  That’s nearly two not-retired Prince Fielder seasons, but the difference is that Fielder wasn’t in the dugout adversely affecting a batting lineup, or on the field being fat, immobile and hurting the team defensively.

Most anyone with a brain knows that at some point, the roster spot is more valuable than a bad asset, and the smart play would have been cut Kim, eat the $20M, and to have kept Jorge Mateo, who at the time I’m writing this, had contributed +0.7 bWAR to the Braves before he was ungratefully released.  But like I said, the Braves are so corporate and so predictable, that everyone unfortunately knew that they were going to keep Kim and demand to get any modicum of ROI.

Again, I hate that this is happening to Kim, because this will undoubtedly make the baseball public continue to question Korean baseball players while still fetishizing Japanese ones, and I hate that it’s happening to the Braves. This will further cloud their willingness to use the free agent market, and I’m not going to hold my breath that I’ll ever see a day where there’s a standout Korean player on the Braves.

When the inevitable day comes where the Braves are bounced from the playoffs, many are going to be pointing their fingers at Kim, who sure, isn’t undeserving of it, but the team is also culpable for keeping him, when more optimally strategic options were available the whole time, due to their obsession with ROI and getting their money’s worth clouding optimal strategy.  That part, wouldn’t be on Kim.

The white man’s equivalent to blackout license plate covers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While I was commuting to the office one day, I noticed a Ford Bronco that had a vanity license plate that consisted of nothing but 1’s and I’s.  So if you can picture this description in your head, you can imagine that it’s basically a vanity plate with seven straight lines at a quick glance.  You can also probably also imagine that at a quick glance, it’s probably impossible to accurately pinpoint what the correct combination of characters is, which is more than likely the intention of the white guy who chose it and I’m confident that it’s a white guy because only white people drive and covet Ford Broncos the way they do.

The thing is, this isn’t the first deliberately deceptive vanity tag I’ve seen, it’s just that now I felt like writing about it, and how it seems to be a pattern that it’s always white men who tend to have them.  1I11II1, 0O00OO0, B888BB8, or any other combination of characters that have the capability to blend and confuse human eyes, which is more than likely the intention.  And when people have the intention to deceive, than more than likely it’s so that they can get away with deceit; probably just driving like a dick, but these days the hopes and thoughts that they can confuse the antichrist-like nefarious flock cameras that are all the rage in the increasing environment of surveillance.

And it’s always white males that do this.  Every time I’ve noticed one of these types of plates and I’ve managed to pull adjacent to the vehicle, it’s always been a white guy.  It’s not hyperbole, and it’s not just an isolated incident.  Definitely more than this one instance, but maybe not quite ten times, but every single time I’ve seen a deliberately confusing vanity tag, it’s been a white guy.

Clearly, this is the white man’s equivalent to the blackout license plate covers that black people who want to drive like dicks put on their cars; the intention is the same, but the approaches are different.  Black folk don’t want The Man and Big Brother to have it easy identifying their whips while they drive however the fuck they want to, so they use dark covers and obscurers, but in only the way Whitey can do, white folk do it by hiding in plain sight with completely legal, albeit hard to decipher, vanity plates.

I have a friend that’s in law enforcement, and they said that modern plate readers have no issue in being able to identify vague license plates, so really the intention of them is to confuse other people on the road.  The irony is that white or black, people who want to act like they’re trying to obstruct and make their license plates less identifiable, only draw more scrutiny to themselves by going to the lengths they do. 

If I saw an orange Ford Bronco whose license plate was a state-issued CWN5637, I’ll have forgotten it by the next light, but regardless of if I’m accurate or not, I’ll remember seeing I1II11I or whatever such combination actually is and know that the guy driving it is probably some entitled white guy who drives like a douche.

When everyone has a hundo, nobody does

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I do play a little bit pretty much every single day, I actually don’t have a whole lot of knowledge of what’s going on in Pokémon Go.  I don’t read the patch notes, updates, or even pay much attention to whenever Professor Willow shoehorns himself onto the screen to tell me of some missions that are afoot.  I just play a little bit every day, try and do daily research, attempt to complete as many of the weekly tasks as I can, hatch eggs, and make some modicum of progress in levels.

To what end, I have no idea, and typing this all out, I kind of realize just how fruitless my ambition in the game really is.  It’s just something that I’ve done for probably 99% of the time since the game launched a decade ago, and OCD me has just stuck with it.  I like to think that I want to get shinies and hundos and shiny hundos, and to have an impressive Pokédex of rares and strong quality Pikachus, but when the day is over, there really is no goal in place for me.

All the same, recently the game has been celebrating its actual 10-year anniversary, and despite the fact that I don’t pay much attention to the happenings of the game, one of the things I can say that that I wager not as many people as they might think can claim is that fact that I have regularly played since the debut of the game, and although my level and accomplishments in the game might not reflect it, it is true.

One of the major things the game has decided to do in honor of the decade-long survival of a mobile game, is that to all players, they have an ultra-super low-hanging fruit mission to where the prizes for completion are a Master Ball, as well as a guaranteed encounter with a MewTwo.  Over social media, it became apparent that this specific MewTwo encounter was a guaranteed hundo (perfect stats), and as is the case with MewTwo encounters, there is a decent chance that one could get a shiny.

Many have flexed screen grabs of their shiny hundo MewTwos; my own was not shiny, but that’s fine because I already have a shiny, albeit it is not a hundo, but I can be content with the fact that I now have a hundo MewTwo in my Pokédex, even if it is basically a free giveaway.

But unsurprising, there has been a faction of Pikachu Game players who have opined their general disappointment and low-key bitterness that the game has basically taken the prestige and distinction of having MewTwos of any quality, by basically giving everyone one, pretty much for free.

I get that sentiment; when the game initially released MewTwo, in extremely difficult raids, with extremely difficult catch rates, if you could be lucky enough to participate in the raid much less succeed in the first place, I went out of my way to join communities, find out where other players were gathering, and got my ass out of the house in order to try and catch them.  I was determined to complete my Kanto collection 100%, which was possible for me seeing as how I had actually traveled to places like Asia and Europe and gotten region-specific Pikachus like Farfetch’d and Mr. Mime, and now MewTwo was the last one to round out Kanto.

I remember how accomplished I felt when I finally got my first one, and how I declared myself a true lord of Kanto.  But then the itch of the Three PS3s guy kind of creeped into my brain, and I began to ask myself why stop with just one MewTwo, when I could have three?  It was a little bit of a grind, but I got my third MewTwo, but then it kept going, and going, and at the time I’m writing this, I have 22 MewTwos, which isn’t bad for someone who doesn’t live in like New York City or Seoul or any other high-density location where there are always 6 Pokéstops and gyms every square mile, where taking down the strongest of gyms is easy with high bases of players.

Needless to say, it is kind of a crappy feeling to know how many people are getting basically a free hundo MewTwo now just for participating, when it was so difficult to get them back when they first emerged.  It cheapens the rarity and sense of accomplishment of getting them in the past for the old heads like me who have been in the trenches of daily playing for the better part of the last decade, and I can understand the salt from players like us.

Naturally, there are contrarians to the detractors, and I’ve seen commenters on social media throwing up all sorts of analogies and straw man metaphors to try and shit on the people who shit on the event which just leads to the shitty wasteland that is a social media arena, and I’ve smartly decided to stay out of public discussion because I know I’d just get piled on for my opinions and I don’t need that, and I have a brog that nobody reads where I can air out my thoughts without any concern of rebuttal.

People complaining about free stuff, rich people complaining about too much butter on their lobsters, but the one that piqued my interest were those accusing the haters that they probably hated when the government paid off student loan debts.  I get the analogy, and see the similarities between people who have responsibly paid their student loan debts off getting salty over thousands of people suddenly getting them absolved, but at the same time it’s laughable that someone would even make the analogy of student loan debt versus Pokémon Go.

Student loan debt is a legitimate problem in the world, and there are very real-world consequences for those who have struggled on account of them.  Pokémon Go is a fucking phone game, and nobody at all has endured any sort of legitimate struggle on account of it.  But from a semantics standpoint, yes it is similar; tenured lifers who have put in their 10,000+ hours suddenly getting to see filthy casuals get to reap similar rewards with a fraction of the effort, it does make sense.

The thing is, this isn’t even the first time that Niantic has pulled this shit of lowering the bar and giving tons of shit away for free in order to boost engagement, downloads and player participation.  A few years ago when I went to Korea, I was psyched to be able to catch a Farfetch’d, and I went kind of out of my way to get one, and I felt so proud when I did.  But literally that same trip, Niantic dropped this event where players could briefly get regional Pikachus from other regions, meaning those in the west were able to get Farfetch’d, Mr. Mime went to the Oceanic, Tauros went to Europe, and Kangaskhan came to Asia.

It’s hypocritical for me to have felt a similar salt since thanks to that event I was able to get Kangaskhan without having to go to Australia/NZ, but I did admittedly feel salt that Americans were able to get Farfetch’d without having to be in Asia, like I was at that very time.  They didn’t earn it, and I did feel annoyance when I’d see like Facebook friends who I know long abandoned the game, who were posting about how they’d logged in for the first time in. years just to get it, and smugly proclaim how they intended to hibernate immediately afterward.

But at the end of the day, it’s still just Pokémon Go.  In two weeks, everyone will have forgotten about this whole thing, and as time passes, everyone’s hundo MewTwos won’t mean shit, especially if like 70% of them will be in accounts that will just go dormant for months to years.  But it’s still interesting to see the whole shitshow of Niantic dropping an event, and the inevitable clash between the lifers, versus all of the filthy casuals who pop in and feel as entitled and deserving to the same benefits that those who have actually put in the work to get beforehand already have.

If only I were in my 30s again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There have been multiple times in my life in which I have thought that I was born in the wrong time.  Like whenever I see professional gamers and how revered they are in Korea and how worshipped they are in the gaming community, I think to myself that maybe that could’ve been me, had I been born in like ten years later than I was, where my parents wouldn’t have discouraged and shamed my love of video games and instead nurtured and encouraged them, and maybe I could’ve ended up like Faker or Daigo or some other professional gamer that makes millions of dollars playing video games and streaming video games today.

Lately, I’ve been having those similar thoughts again because for whatever reason, the social media algorithm has decided to start providing me reels of all these people who basically do nothing but film themselves, going around doing mundane things by themselves, but usually prefaced with a caption of “single 30-something does X in a day,” and it’s a 45-70 second reel of them going around, doing mundane things, with the underlying hook being that they’re doing it peacefully and without anyone bothering them.

Grocery shopping, visiting some local restaurant, going on a run, hitting the gym, driving around, eating some more food, cooking food that they’ll eat, getting and/or drinking a fancy coffee; running some mundane errands but doing it at their own pace and leisure.

These videos will all have hundreds to thousands of reactions, comments and seemingly very high engagement numbers, and although it might be all by bots, the stats are still stats, and undoubtedly these people are making money doing such.  They all have templated formats, cold opens and tiny gimmicks, presumably to make them who they are, but at the root of things, they’re still just doing mundane crap, and it just so happens that they’re not all unattractive blobs of humanity, they’re admittedly watchable.

I just can’t help but think that if I were in my 30s now, when I was single forever, and had pretty much nothing but time on my hands when I wasn’t working, I could be in on this hustle, and be making a bunch of videos about my mundane life and presumably be getting paid to do it, and when I got tired of doing it, I’d have a million bucks in my bank account to where I could have the seed money to perhaps embark on to my current life, but with moar capital backing me up.

Seriously, I’m not sure I could churn out content at the rate as many of these creators do, but I think about the things that I have done in my life throughout my 30s, and wonder if some things would be worth making content out of.

  • 30-year old single Korean-American travels to X to visit MLB team/park/city
  • A day in the life of a 31-year old Korean living in Atlanta
  • How a 32-year old single Korean guy prepares for standby travel
  • 33-year old single Korean guy gets stranded in Minneapolis
  • Dragon*con with a 34-year old single Korean guy
  • 35-year old Korean guy visits Korea for the very first time

Shit, I could do what a lot of the creators do now.  Albeit perhaps with less of the extravagances they subtly like to flex, like how all their cars seem to be way high-end, or they have designer belongings, but I like to go to coffee shops and restaurants, and I could film myself walking into a gym or an H-Mart.  Film myself going to my computer “to work” and all the other inane bullshit that all these creators do.

And when the cameras aren’t rolling, basking in the largely positive ratio of engagement scores that my content is generating, and waiting for all the digital media money to start rolling in, and encouraging me to keep going.

Nah, instead I’m in my mid-40s now, married with kids, and I’m not saying that they’re the reason why I couldn’t embark on a new career of being a content creator, it’s just that I know that content creation is an largely, wholly time-consuming endeavor to embark on, and personally it’s more important to be present with my family and children versus getting caught up in the rat race of trying to produce, film, edit, and post content, and knowing my luck, by the time I get the machine rolling, the content creation bubble will pop, and it won’t be nearly as lucrative then as it is now.

And ironically, the new moneyball of making money, would be getting a fucking job, doing it, and getting these periodic things called paychecks.

But, nothing is ever going to change until I get in on things, because I am begrudgingly the master of the universe, and nothing happens until I decide to get involved.  If I did what the single 30s somethings are doing today, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as monetarily viable as it is now.

Let’s talk about House of the Dragon

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[boilerplate warning for potential spoilers as if I had any actual human readers]

Originally, I had wanted to write about S3 of House of the Dragon sooner, but other topics and a lack of time kept pushing it and pushing it and I never really got to it, but seeing as how the season finale has come and gone, it seems topical enough again to warrant writing about.

But I would have to say that this has probably been the most stressful season of House of the Dragon, or maybe even any season of any other Game of Thrones or sub-brand season before this one.  Not because of all the fighting, bloodshed, death or political cunning, but mostly because of how relatable to real life this season was, in the sense that there was a whole lot of talking, not a lot of action, constant planning and setting up, wheels spinning, character incompetence, and by the time anything really happened in the season finale, it was more a combination of “it’s about fucking time,” and “let’s just get it over with.”

In other words, S3 of House of the Dragon was a lot like a corporate job, and that, was the most stressful thing in the world for me to have to watch, and completely stifled much of the potential enjoyment there could have been.

Despite ascending to the crown, Rhaenyra Targaryen basically turned into middle management, and that was the initial impetus for wanting to write about the season.  It didn’t matter that she had risen to Protector of the Realm, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, poor Rhaenyra basically spent the lion’s share of the season embroiled in managerial squabbles of overhead consolidation upon a merger, rapid-fire personnel changes, disgruntled customers, as well as the sheer custodial woes of moving to a new office.  She became an overwhelmed and overstimulated corporate manager who thought she was fit for the role but quickly discovered that all was not what she thought it was going to be, and she and her kingdom suffered tremendously as a result.

I couldn’t have cared less about what Aegon and the creepy crippled foot fetish guy were doing on their merry adventures, or what the Hightowers were trying to accomplish in the shadows, but every time I saw Rhaenyra sitting on the Iron Throne listening to the small folk squabble and complain and beg for resources, I’d feel my blood pressure rising, and then she tries to go hide to compose herself, and there are fucking rats all over the castle, and it’s like every person in corporate who gets overwhelmed by their jobs, tries to go home for any bit of reprieve, only to find the bullshit of homeownership waiting for them there.

The season was like Westerosi Office Space and I don’t think George R.R. Martin realizes that he could have a pretty fun project on his hands if he could stop eating lobster and counting his HBO money long enough to add one more thing to his to-do list, a hundred bullet points underneath not-finishing Winds of Winter.

Needless to say, in my personal opinion, S3 of Houes of the Dragon was pretty booty.  Mythical wife and our au pair, whom we all watched the show together, they both were ahead of the curve with turning on the season than I was, and by the time we got to the finale, it was like dragging them into the media room to get this shit over with, while I didn’t really think it was that bad until I really started to think about it.

The biggest takeaway for me from this season, as well as the series as a whole frankly, is the fact that it hasn’t done a very good job of making any characters that I really liked, much less cared about.  I haven’t read Fire and Blood like I did the entire five books of A Song of Ice and Fire so I don’t really know if there will be any characters that I’d like, but as far as the show goes, House of the Dragon does a shitty job of making relatable or interesting characters worthy of liking or caring about.

I loved all sorts of characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, mostly side characters like Bronn, the Hound, and Podrick Payne.  Many other characters commanded respect like Brienne, and Davos, and when the day is over, I clearly am declared to House Stark, because they’re a bunch of honor-bound squares like me that always wants to believe we’re making the right choice.

House of the Dragon has no such characters that I feel any sort of care, relation or really any shits to give about towards, and that was its biggest handicap for me, personally.  Nobody was really likeable, or respectable, and I found that to be key in deciding that the show as a whole is clearly weaker than its predecessor, and nowhere near as good as Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Otto is no Littlefinger.  Ormond, whom I was not sold on within five minutes, as the big bad of the season, was clearly no Ramsey or High Sparrow as a boss character.  All the kids except for maybe Baela are all dumb shitheads who pretty much all get or are going to get what they all deserve.  Corlys, in spite of his station and title pretty much does nothing, like ever, and let’s not talk about Grand Maester Orwyle who epitomizes the guy in the office that has an important title but goes to extraordinary lengths to hide and do absolutely jack shit.

I kind of did like Gwayne Hightower, since he was this constant voice of reason, who had a knack for surviving, and I had to respect the hustle.  He was probably the closest thing to a character that I had any affinity towards, despite the fact that I wanted to see the rest of his family get slaughtered.  But everyone else could drop dead at any point and I wouldn’t have cared.  Even the main cast, were all obnoxious and neutered and nerfed the whole season, save for maybe Daemon, but by and large, my point remains, there were really no likeable characters in House of the Dragon, and to me, that is pretty much the chief reason why I think the show as a whole suffered, and will probably continue to suffer in future, insufferable seasons.

KOREAN JOHN CENA

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I have an observation that I want to share with others.  But I sometimes have this anxiety of feeling like I make other people feel like I’m too frequent a social media poster, and I don’t like feeling like I’m the only one in some of my group chats that starts conversations or blurts out random things, and frankly social media is trash and is often times not worthy of the things I have to say, so thank goodness I have a personal brog for me to use as an outlet, even if nobody will ever see it.

But even if it’s just a statement that really doesn’t need much explanation, it then makes me feel like I need to write more words about it to justify making an entire post despite the fact that I have no real rules about what I write on a personal site but that’s just one of those weird self-imposed obligations I hold myself to, but if there’s anything at all, it’s a good exercise to endlessly be practicing my writing.

I just finished watching 참교육 which for all the white folk is Teach You A Lesson on Netflix.  When I first saw it popping up on the home screen, I couldn’t help but notice that the obvious main character of the show (김무열) was a dead ringer for John Cena, but if he were Korean.  Like seriously, it’s basically John Cena’s face with Korean eyes and black hair, but generally the exact same jaw line, cheekbone structure and silhouette of his head.  I couldn’t get over it, and always said to myself, or aloud when I saw him, KOREAN JOHHHHHN CENAAAA

Then because big brother is always watching, I got a preview reel of it on social, and I watched as Korean John Cena was killing a bunch of high school punks with defense, getting them to swing and miss and wail on each other, and then I thought to myself, yeah ok, this might be interesting to watch after all, and when the moment was right, I dove right into watching.

My mom would have called this an 엉터리 show, which is Korean for trash or bullshit, and from a literal point of view, yeah, it might be.  But I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy the it, because the plot was very linear, situations were exaggerated heavily for emphasis, it wasn’t a season of 26 episodes at 94 minutes each like a lot of Korean shows tend to drag on for, and of course, it had Korean John Cena.

And the best part is that his character, ERPB Inspector Na Hwa-Jin basically was like John Cena, in the sense that he was basically permanently Super Cena where nobody could hurt him, he was always coming out on top, and always seemed to have the moral high ground no matter the circumstances.

Hopefully the show doesn’t achieve the level of popularity to where white folks feel the need to re-make it for white people, even if the very Korean tropes featured throughout the show mostly wouldn’t hardly apply to Americans, but never underestimate white peoples’ ability to appropriate and twist things in order to make it work for whitey.  However, if this were ever to come to fruition and an American version of Teach You A Lesson starred actual John Cena in the leading role, then maybe it would have a chance.  Lord knows the role is tailor made for him.