Author: dannyhong

Appreciation for Letterkenny

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I think it’s funny how much Canadian comedy shows are finding so much success in America over the last few years.  Of course Schitt’s Creek really gets a lot of credit as far as Canadian shows go, but I was surprised that stuff like Corner Gas made its way stateside, and actually did fairly decently, in spite of its very local, very Canadian subject matter.

Canada seems to have this formula of small town, encapsulated universe comedies down, and over the last week or so, I’ve been making my way through pretty much, all of Letterkenny.  Prior to going all-in and just plowing through the series, I’d only seen clips or heard references of it, and of course there was that month where Hulu got the rights to the show, and they blasted the ever living shit out of advertising the show on just about every site that could support banners and video ads.

But either way, I’ve been going through the series, and I’m wrapping up season 8 right now, and before long, I’ll be done with season 9 and be awaiting alongside all other fans of the show for future seasons in real-time.

The show is witty, clever, and easily digestible, and the fact that they’re all like 22 minute episodes make them the perfect things to watch in tiny chunks, where I can sneak in an episode while feeding #2, while #1 is still napping and we never have any televisions on when she’s awake.  I can watch 1-2 episodes in the evening when I don’t want to commit to a plot-heavy thriller or a film or some episodic series drama, so as I’ve often said, as I get older and my plate tends to get heavier, the lower the run time gets, the more I favor it.

I love that the show itself are fans of Howard Stern and professional wrestling, and it feels like if there were ever a show that was like a Canadian version of my persona, this was kind of it.  Although I think he’s kind of a Marty Stu in how he’s the penultimate alpha who’s the toughest, most woke, most enlightened and the center of everyone’s universe, Wayne is still a likable character and kind of embodies the persona that lots of guys want to have: tough, intelligent, honorable, and of course, the object of pretty much every woman’s attraction, but really I get the most enjoyment from the show whenever characters just erupt into one of the numerous fights, because that’s the kind of shit I’d fantasize about participating in, but don’t have the guts to really get into.

Overall, it’s another quality Canadian comedy, that has a surprising amount of heart in it, in spite of how crude and low-hanging fruit the comedy can get, and I just wanted to share a few words of appreciation I had for the series, because during a period where I have so little time to indulge in small pleasures, Letterkenny has brought me a little bit of much needed enjoyment throughout the last few days, and I can say that I’m a fan of the show.

2 Under 2: No time like the present (#068)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

About a month ago, I wanted to write a post about how I was embarking on my paternity time for the second time, on account of the arrival of #2.  How I was looking forward to not having to worry about work for 12 weeks, and all sorts of ideas of ways I could be productive and get shit done with no work looming over me.

Well it’s been about a month since I’ve started my paternity leave, and unsurprisingly I have not accomplished nearly as much as I hoped I would prior to the start of it.

Who would have guessed that juggling two kids would consume so much of my capacity, even without having to worry about work?  Pff certainly not me.  In all fairness, our Disney trip consumed nearly two weeks of my leave, since it encapsulated a Tuesday through a Wednesday, and trying to accomplish anything before or catch up afterward just weren’t going to happen.

But going into my paternity leave, I made goals of accomplishing several tasks:

  • Refinance my home: rates are crazy low and with a second child in tow, refinancing my mortgage to try and bring down my monthly payment and free up some cash sounded like a tremendously good idea
  • Look for a new job: the cat is out of the bag by now, and most everyone knows I’m quite unhappy with my job, and would like to seek out a new one now
  • Explore the possibility of upgrading to a larger car: my car of two years and less than 15,000 miles is already too small for the size of my rapidly grown family, and I would like to capitalize on the potential of the also-hot used car market, and try to trade in my car for maximum value, so that I may upgrade to a larger vehicle
  • Yard work: there are some shrubs I want to get rid of, and some general cleanup I’d like to do around my driveway and walking paths, as well as reclaim some of the wild land in the field adjacent to my home, while the poison ivy is wilting and the snakes are going into hiding

So nothing too lofty, provided there’s a reasonable amount of time to do them, but therein lies the biggest problem – there’s just simply never any fucking time.

Continue reading “2 Under 2: No time like the present (#068)” →

Well I’ll be damned

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t look like anything to me: the Braves miraculously stave off Atlanta’ing, defeat the Dodgers to win the National League pennant for the first time since 1999

Granted, this is all just an elaborate setup to better last year’s colossal failure, by advancing to the World Series, where the Braves will inevitably humiliate themselves and likely get obliterated by the Astros’ murderers pitching rotation.  After all, if you take the Braves’ last two World Series appearances (1996, 1999), they’re 2-8 with all eight of those losses happening in a row, so as if history hasn’t been on their side at any step of their playoff run, it’s even worse when it comes to the World Series.

I actually had a complex about the Houston Astros, which dates back to 2004 and 2005, when the Braves lost to the Astros in two straight NLDSes, with the latter one ending on an epic collapse of a game, which turned into a miserable 18-inning affair where the Astros won on a walk-off home run from a shitty player hitting off of an even shittier pitcher.

From then on, I basically loathed the Astros, especially since they were still in the National League at the time, and I basically rooted for anyone they played against.  One of the best games I remember going to was at the tail-end of 2006, when the Braves had a shit season where their streak of division titles came to an end, but at least they salvaged the end of the season by spoiling the Astros’ late-season playoff push, most notably in a game where the vaunted Roger Clemens was outpitched by a literal Lowes window installer named Chuck James. 

The grudge held for quite a while until I stopped caring about sports and baseball as much, and then I accepted that flavors change and ebb and flow, to the point where I even started rooting for them in 2017, when I watched them pick up Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran, and I felt that these veterans were the key acquisitions that would push them into legitimate contention, and the season became a game of just wanting to be right, plus the Braves were in the midst of a dreadful rebuild and not even worth paying any attention to.  Regardless of the eventual cheating scandal that was unearthed, I was happy with their World Series win that year.

And now we’re at a point where the World Series is going to be the Houston Astros versus the Atlanta Braves.  Feels weird to even type “World Series” and “Atlanta Braves” in the same sentence after all the decades of failure I’ve witnessed at this point.  The Astros are the team most people outside of Houston love to hate, due to the cheating scandal, and the Braves and their paltry 88-wins are the team that really had no business even being in the playoffs, much less the World Series, but the playoffs are basically a different stratosphere, and nobody would have guessed that Eddie Rosario would be the guy playing the role of Reggie Jackson this year.

I don’t really know how to feel.  I want to be happy and excited that the Braves have made it to the World Series, but the oft-burned and jaded sports fan in me wants to pump the brakes and temper expectations, because it is still an Atlanta team ascending to the biggest games, and all of us here in Georgia have seen for eons what typically happens in those scenarios.  As much I want to see the Braves win a championship, I’m more anxious that we’ll see another 1996 or a 1999, or a 28-3, or a Tua Tagovailoa, or any other examples of a massive Atlanta blunder that results in a humiliating defeat that begs to ponder if it would’ve been better to just suck and not even put ourselves in that position.  I’m quite tired of Atlanta being the butt of sports city jokes, and another championship failure while so close to the crown, while not definitively unbearable, I just don’t want to think about it if it happens.

It figures that when I proclaimed that I wouldn’t write about the playoffs again, this actually happened.  So I’ll maintain that I’ll try to limit my baseball talk to this post seeing as how I still have a queue of topics that I want to catch up to, and hope for the best while not watching or following any of the games, because I, and I alone, have the power to kill the Braves, solely by tuning in.

100 Days, the sequel

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today is a special day in the life of my family.  #2 has made it to day 100 of her existence, and this is an actual occasion in Korean culture, known as baek-il (백일).

Historically, this became a thing back in the olden days when Korea was so ravaged by poverty, famine, disease and Japanese people, the life expectancy of children was so low, that even making it to 100 days was considered monumental.  Sure, the passage of time has changed some things quite drastically, but the occasion has stuck, and baek-ils are acknowledged by Koreans all over to this very day.

Ironically, not much has changed since #1’s own baek-il from last year.  Considering the fact that coronavirus is still very much around and killing people on a daily basis, and that America has basically become a third-world country with an economy that’s surpassed by at this point, multiple countries, there’s a loose comparison to be made about disease and poverty.

That being said, it is, more noteworthy that #2 has survived the first 100 days of her life, than it really should be, but that’s the state of the world we live in.

I know I’ve been using my brog over the last few months at something of a sounding board of how much I’m struggling with two kids, but what I really hope is that in future years whenever I look back through the On This Day plug-in, I’ll re-read a lot of the things I’ve written under fatigue and exasperation, and either shake my head, laugh, or just cringe at the mental frying I went through raising two under two. 

No matter what I say, how frustrated I come off as, and things that I may insinuate under duress, I love my kids and I love my wife, and I will continue to do so no matter what.  Collectively and individually, they are the best things to happen to my life, and even if I lose my shit from time to time, I always come back and always remember that they are my everything.

100 days down, onto the rest of our lives, with only the best things being wished for.

China and Japan being jealous fatties over Squid Game makes me smile

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure how theFacebook algorithms got me so good, but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that there was a site actually called Koreaboo and it wasn’t just a slang term that I used amongst my friends.  And obviously a site with such a name would have an obvious bias, but there were some interesting articles that piqued my interest and served as a little bit of fuel for some words to be spit up.

Obviously, when something becomes white hot popular as Netflix’s Squid Game has been, there are all sorts of detractors that come out of the woodwork or go out of their way to go all contrarian on it; I’d be the first to admit that I’ve most definitely done that on all sorts of things that I was late to the party on, so I just decided to shun it instead of embrace it late.

Naturally, since Squid Game game to the world courtesy the entertainment kings of Asia in South Korea, this would draw the skepticism, ire and jealousy from those in other, lesser Asian countries.

China, in spite of their general fear of Korean media, and even going so far as to basically ban K-Pop, citing that Chinese men needed to be more masculine and not as seemingly as fluffy as K-Pop boy band stars, responds to Squid Game, by basically ripping the whole fucking show off in order to create a variety show.

I mean, this was about the least surprising thing in the world as China as a country gives absolutely no fucks when it comes to copyrights and intellectual properties, and counterfeits anything and everything at all, without any shame.  It’s like that internet rule where if it’s ever existed, there’s porn of it on the internet, but if there’s anything that’s ever existed, it has most definitely been ripped off in China.

Titled literally “Squid’s Victory,” it will be something of a variety show or a game show, where people will play kids games for cash prizes.  So unfortunately, there will be no people killing themselves for money, but as the above title card shows, there’s literally zero shame by the Chinese company of ripping off the title card of the Korean Squid Game.  Little else is known yet of Squid’s Victory, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that whatever set the show will take place on will have all sorts of maze-like colorful doors and stairs that is a completely original idea.

And then we have the Japanese, who are of course jealous over the juggernaut that Squid Game, going as far as to proclaim it’s position on Netflix rankings had to be due to some sort of cheating manipulation, and then proclaiming that Japan had the OG lock on the death game genre, which they’re not entirely wrong with, seeing as how Battle Royale came out two decades prior.

The real salt emerges when pondering why Squid Game is so popular globally, while films like Battle Royale really only won over weebs and convention nerds, which is a pretty easy question to answer, because the quality of the writing, the acting, and simply the plot itself was just far superior when comparing the two stories.  Firstly, live-action Japanese actors can’t act for shit, and as entertaining of a film Battle Royale was, the acting is pretty terrible save for Takeshi Kitano himself.  Then the fleshed out plot of Squid Game, centralized around the despair people feel when they’re economically facing drowning in poverty is something that people can relate to a whole lot better than getting randomly selected in a government lottery to have to fight to their death without any choice.  And of course, there’s the obvious medium, where just everyone can access Squid Game, and unless you purchased a VCD or a region-free DVD on eBay, there was no real way to watch Battle Royale.

Regardless, seeing the jealousy bubble up from entire countries over the success of Squid Game is very amusing to me, and now that Korea has set the bar so high, it’s going to be amusing to see what all these lesser countries do to try and get a piece of the yellow fever for Asian media that the rest of the world is starting to get, thanks to Korea.

You’re welcome, China, Japan and all you other 개새끼 countries.

2 Under 2: How can I lose myself when I’m already lost (#067)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

What I’ve been doing recently is that I have decided that between the time in which #2 goes to bed which I’m really hoping is closer to 11 pm and not 12 am, and no later than 1:00 am, that is declared me time.  Time in which I will not be job searching, not researching potential cars, and I will not be doing absolutely anything at all unless it is self-serving solely for me, which is to say that it’s become the only time in the world I’m granting myself to actually do some fucking writing.

The good news is that it is providing me some time to actually do some writing, even if it is coming at the cost of the sleep that I most certainly would benefit from getting more of as well.

However, the bad news is that so far, it’s often times the time in which I’m in not the best of head spaces when I finally sit down in my office and have two fucking seconds where I’m not handcuffed to a child or doing something that pertains to the kids.  But on the flip side, I frankly think my writing is sometimes better when there’s a little (or a lot of) anger behind it, because fewer truths come out than when raging on the keyboard.

One thing that was often suggested to me when I was becoming a new parent, was the importance of keeping hobbies and having time to unwind, so that you don’t lose yourself or your personal identity to being just a parent.

Thinking back to all the times I’ve heard or been told such a bullshit suggestion, I’m inclined to believe that these people either don’t have kids, or weren’t in similar circumstances in which I’m in, with two kids under the age of two, while both myself and mythical wife work full-time jobs and have no immediately available family or support system remotely close by to lend a helping hand, all while being in the middle of a fucking pandemic.

Needless to say, I’m not “losing myself,” because I’m already fucking long past the state lines of where my general life has been left behind and lost.  I have absolutely zero time for myself, every single day of the week, and the only reprieves I have are maybe an hour every weekday, where there’s a small overlap where the nanny reprieves me of duty from #1, and #2 is still sleeping, and then the late night time at the end of the day in which I should be catching up on sleep but instead I’m so pissed and resentful at my lack of personal time that I’m hate-staying up until 1:00 am.

Continue reading “2 Under 2: How can I lose myself when I’m already lost (#067)” →

The 2021 MLB Playoffs post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Part of the challenge of trying to write posts from the past is that sometimes, there are particular topics that end up being more time sensitive than others, on account of the fact that they’re things like sports or live events to which if too much time passes, then the impetus for the original posts could become invalidated, and therefore useless to try to even bother writing about, retroactively.

That being said, I’m skipping the queue a little bit, and ultimately just going to make a singular post about the 2021 MLB Playoffs, because zero people who read my shit will give two shits about baseball playoffs, and the likelihood of me revisiting this topic with the time that I don’t have is pretty much not going to happen, but I wanted to put down some words that were going through my head before time passes and then I won’t be able to.

At the time I’m writing this, the National and American Leagues have both advanced to their respective championship series.  The Boston Red Sox vs. the Houston Astros in the American League, and in the National League, a rematch from last year – the Braves vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers.  In fact, the Braves have a 2-0 series lead on the Dodgers, to which where me simply acknowledging such a fact is condemnation for a repeat of last year, where the Braves Atlanta’d away their favor, and watched as the Dodgers went onto win a very winnable World Series.

To say that my excitement for the Braves having a 2-0 on the defending world champions is non-existent would be an understatement.  Last year proved that there is absolutely no reason to be excited for the Braves to actually succeed, as they pissed away both a 3-1 series lead, as well as killed all momentum for my theory of baby luck, and even though I could say baby luck is most certainly in play again this year, I learned my lesson last year to hold hopes that any Atlanta team could hold true to any superstition other than their inexplicable ability to choke no matter the circumstances.

Frankly, it’s a Christmas miracle and simply the crapshoot logic of divisions, rules and alignment that the Braves are here in the first place, and part of why everything is just so hilarious with the way things are standing right now.

The Braves won 88 games, which makes them literally the worst team in the entire playoff picture.  The Red Sox, Yankees, Cardinals and Dodgers, who were all the wild card teams who had to scrap for the ability to play in a play-in game to see who got to get into the real playoffs, all had more than 88 wins.  In fact, the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners who both missed the playoffs had 90 wins, but by virtue of the fact that the Braves played in the most putrid NL East division, and won it with 88 wins, they avoided the play-in game, and most hilariously, are considered the “higher” seed in the match-up against the 106-win Dodgers in the NLCS where they did their job and capitalized on the opening two games at home in Smyrna.

Now one thing I would stated that’s now been invalidated by the passage of time, is that the St. Louis Cardinals made the playoffs, and they are whom I would’ve bet the farm on going al the way, because as much as I hate the Cards, they’re just that one charmed team that always goes all the way if they can just get their toe into the door.  But they ran into the aforementioned 106-win Dodgers team, but not for lack of effort, considering the Cardinals deadlocked the Dodgers pretty much the entire game and it took a walk-off to send them packing.

I’m actually not that surprised that the Braves beat the Brewers in the NLDS.  If there were any team that I would’ve wanted the Braves to match up against, it would’ve been the Brewers, and most definitely not the Giants or Dodgers.  Had it been either of those two teams, the Braves would’ve been bounced from the first round like they do every other time they’ve made it into the playoffs.

And back to present time, where the Braves are up 2-0 on the Dodgers, and I still have 0% faith that they’re actually going to seal the deal, mostly on account of the fresh history of last year.  Furthermore, with the Red Sox and the Astros duking it out in the AL, MLB is salivating over the potential narrative of the Dodgers versus either one of those teams in the World Series, considering both teams were basically found out to have cheated against the Dodgers in prior World Series in 2017 and 2018.  

With the potential revenge storyline on the table, I wouldn’t put it past MLB to low-key sabotage the NLCS in favor of the Dodgers, and maybe we’ll see some more wonky check-swing strikeouts called by the umpires against the Braves, or maybe we’ll just see the Braves be the Braves and just implode on their own.  Either way, no matter that nobody will admit it, the Dodgers being in the World Series is what will be decided to be best for business, and what I’d expect to be the case by the end of next week when the pennants should be decided.