Author: dannyhong

When it comes to college application time, my kids are now ‘white’

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYP: Chinese-American kid with near-perfect credentials and worthiness rejected by 16 out of 18 schools; family pursuing legal action

Firstly, I’m astounded how this story managed slip by me considering it appears to have originated back in March.  I suppose my Google notification queries weren’t adequate enough to have found about this kid sooner.  Secondly, regardless of the fact that I closed the book on #TRYHARDSZN2025, when I found out about the general context of this story, it couldn’t help but fire up the powder keg of my brain into wanting to write about this, because it really is a pretty astounding story.

We have a student who scored a 1590 on the SAT* and has a 4.42 GPA; typically those things alone are enough to get kids accepted into a whole slew of high-tier colleges.  On top of it, it’s a computer science whiz, was offered a job at Google when he was 13 because his code was so clean, he was assumed to have been an adult, and he founded his own e-signature startup, which really should have had most schools with strong computer science and/or engineering programs salivating to bring in a talent like this into their folds.

*I can’t help but wonder what question he possibly could have gotten wrong on the SAT to dock those ten points, and also wonder if his dad beat the ever-living fuck out of him for failing to miss a perfecto by one question

The problem is that he happened to be Chinese-American, and suddenly he went from diamond in the rough to being a gold flake in the sluice, and was turned down from nearly every school he applied to.  There are so many Asian whiz kids out there every single college application season, that it’s probably more exceptional to be mediocre and full of character like me, instead of being a monster in the books.  Even doing shit like creating startups, developing apps or other exceptional-sounding achievements have begun to sound cookie cutter amongst Asians and guys like this are left to pay the price for everyone being so fucking over-the-top #TRYHARD.

As Syndrome said in The Incredibles, when everyone is super, nobody will be.

And the thing is, it’s not like he was one of those #TRYHARDs that applied to every Ivy League school, in fact the only one he did apply to was Cornell.  With the exceptions of MIT, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, the meat of his applications made it clear that he was favoring staying out on the west coast, with most of his applications staying in California primarily; they’re all good, noteworthy schools, but they’re not Ivies, and they still turned this poor kid down.

So despite my knee-jerk reaction being fuck this kid and his seemingly overzealous dad for going straight to threatening lawsuits, because frankly this happens every year, where a few wunderkind Asian kids get the shaft during college application time, because frankly Asians always get the shaft when it comes to succeeding in America, I’m actually rooting for them to hopefully make some noise and either get the college system in the country to change their racist acceptance policies, or flat out admit that they do discriminate against Asians for being too good at school.

It’s the Asian Curve at its best-worst, where Asian kids basically start the SAT with a score of -200, because without it, they’re completely annihilating the competition, but on a college-application level where Asians are getting rejected by schools because they’re unofficially trying to fill diversity quotas, as opposed to having their student bodies look like the Beijing Olympics.

The funny thing is though, in spite of the bullshit of getting completely owned by the college acceptance system, the kid in question is going to be just fine.  He’s already been hired by Google, and his story, as well as his previous rub with the company, you know he’s already pulling in serious coin, and the ironic best part is that he’ll be getting to do so without having a modicum of student debt to pay towards.

Granted, his parents will forever be denied the Asian honor dream of having a son that went to Harvard or Yale, much less any college at this point, but in a few years once he’s made some money, and has bought them some high-end cars and paid off their mortgage, I’m sure their songs will sound a lot less flat.

All the same, it was an interesting story that really puts the spotlight on how much bullshit #TRYHARDSZN is capable of being, especially for those of kids who are stalwart Asians, because they have to know that their plight to get into top schools is going to be thirty-times harder than those students of different colors of skin, regardless of if anyone will admit to it or not.

Duct tape is useless and overrated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So, I fell through the ceiling of my attic and created an abomination of a mess in my bedroom walk-in closet.  The good news is that I fell in a manner where there was a truss between my legs that broke me from falling all the way into the floor below, and it was like an extreme version of a top-rope crotching spot in wrestling, and I was fortunate to have taken the impact on my inner thigh and not full on in the nuggets.

The bad news, aside from the giant fucking hole in my ceiling, is the disaster of insulation, attic dust and drywall debris that rained in, in my closet.  Again, I should feel fortunate that I fell through my closet and not one of my children’s bedrooms, so that I couldn’t have be beholden to the hours in which they are awake in order for me to address the damage.  Also, the vast majority of shit impacted by the debris was my shit and not mythical wife’s shit, because I’d feel awful if my own malady dirtied up anyone’s belongings other than my own.

All things considered, given the circumstances, I did manage to close up the hole and begin repairs in a fairly expedient and timely manner.  Initially, I was worried that I’d have to rush out to buy some new drywall and hang it in the awkward upside down manner that it had to go up, but I was able to salvage the pieces that snapped and nail them back into place, and I was fortunate to have had the materials from a previous drywall patch job to make a first pass at taping and filling cracks and for all intents and purposes, closing up the hole in the ceiling.

What I found to be frighteningly alarming was the fact that in the area in which I fell through, when I was assessing the damages, it was apparent that drywall throughout my home is held primarily in place with primarily glue.  I’m no builder, so I don’t know if that’s acceptable and is the norm, but I only counted two reinforcing nails in the large area in which I fell through.

Needless to say, I put about 15 nails, into the studs when rehanging the drywall pieces.  It probably won’t stop me from punching  through again should such fate befall me, but the goal is to ensure that this shit stays up.

This will be a multi-day project that I frankly do not need on top of my ordinarily chaotic, packed and excessively stressful life, but I’m trying to find the silver linings in that nobody was hurt, I had tools necessary to begin repairs, and the hole is closed.  I’ll be hunky-dory when it’s painted and looks somewhat passably finished.

But back to the subject of this post, this whole unfortunate tale, stems from the fact that duct tape is fucking useless, and among the many things that I’ve learned throughout my life about how much homeownership sucks, duct tape sucking, has shot up very high in the rankings, to where I genuinely question, what the fuck the point of the product is in the first place.

My house is over 30 years old, and despite the fact that the last time I had an HVAC unit installed, the fuckhead company said the attic ducts were in perfectly fine shape.  Twice now, I’ve had duct pipes disconnect, most likely due to age and previously poor installation, leading to rooms in my home getting denied air flow.  In both cases, I’ve been able to temporarily alleviate the issues by taping the ever-living fuck out of the pipes to get them to reconnect.

However, the key word in that statement is temporarily because despite the fact that I was using a whole lot of duct tape to address duct problems, the shit never lasts at all, and the pipes disconnect, and we’re back to square one of having a disconnected pipe and air conditioned air blowing out uselessly into the attic.

And this is where I’m scratching my head at the sheer ineffectiveness of duct tape as a whole.  I just don’t get it, the shit is called duct tape, designed to aid in the repairs of ducts, and the shit just doesn’t work.  I understand that my attic can get warm and heat has the ability to ruin anything on a long enough timeline, but I’d like to think a product meant to help out things that primarily live in places like attics and crawlspaces where the temperatures will fluctuate to the extremes, should be able to fucking handle it.

I thought it might’ve been a brand thing, because at one point, I probably used some private label duct tape from Harbor Freight, but there’ve been times where I’ve used Duck Tape-branded duct tape, and the result is the same.  I’ve used 3M, which tries to brand themselves as the Rolls Royce of the industry, but same thing, if not maybe lasting a little bit longer.

The funny thing is that duct tape isn’t just useless with dealing with ducts.  In all the years in which I used to make costume props and crafting in general, duct tape is about as ineffective in other logical uses, than it is at leading with actual duct work.  Lots of handsy creative types or enthusiasts of DIY, love to extol duct tape as some sort of miracle connectivity tool.  But whether it’s taping some random craft together, or like when I hit a deer last Thanksgiving and I needed to hold my bumper in place, duct tape is basically nothing more than a short-term, temporary solve, barely good enough to kept something held together until a more effective or permanent fix can be brought into the equation.

The point remains that duct tape is fucking useless for its named purpose, and equally useless in just about any other application.  I need to remember this the next time I’m at a hardware store or in a position where I need to consider options when it comes to having one thing remained attached to another.  If the shit weren’t so useless, I wouldn’t have to constantly be going up into my attic to fix disconnected vents, and the chances of me falling through the ceiling would have been greatly reduced.

Homeownership fucking sucks.

Life as The Janitor class

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like many topics that swirl around in my head that I think about writing a post about, there are times in which I feel like I have to be in the right mood and/or headspace to optimally write about a particular one.

Considering #1 peed all over her bed because we’re still in the process of night potty training her, and #2 decided to obliterate her night-time diaper, probably because I’ve let the kids eat some fairly rich foods over the holiday weekend, which meant I had to clean everything up in the tiny window of time in which is usually spent ushering the girls downstairs for breakfast, I think I’m in the right frame of mind to write about this one finally.

A long time ago, my friends and I played this one board game; I think it was Nemesis Lockdown, because it’s the only board game that I can Google that sounds like what I’m trying to recollect.  Among the playable classes was The Janitor, and that stands out because I’d never heard of a game that took such realism into consideration to where they’d force a player(s) to take on the role of an actual custodian.

And it wasn’t a case of where it was a class in name, and that The Janitor was more a metaphor in that they CLEANED UP THE OPPOSITION or anything remotely more audibly interesting than what actual janitors do.  No, The Janitor class was an actual janitor, where their primary action is to, eliminate waste, that other players and the monster classes leave behind in their wake.  Like, the typical turn for The Janitor was, movement phase towards a tile where waste was, and action phase, the act of cleaning up said waste.  No cool special talent, no hidden bonus to where they could one-shot a baddie, their sole existence in the game was to shuffle around the board, cleaning up after everyone else.

Here’s the twist to the game – if The Janitor were ever to be eliminated, the clock in which the game comes to an end would accelerate to an insurmountable speed.  The game was set up to where there was no way for The Janitor to ever stay on top of the amount of waste that other players and enemies generate, and required tactical management and prioritization of waste disposal.  Smart, cerebral players learn and know how to manage waste disposal to where it doesn’t hinder the survival cause too much.

But if The Janitor were killed, there is no more player who can eliminate any waste, and after every player phase, more and more waste accumulates in the base, and eventually the map becomes immovable.  Either players trap themselves in a prison of waste, or they’re forced to evacuate the base to where monsters would more than likely overwhelm and kill them, but either way, the game ends much faster after the elimination of The Janitor than if they live.

That’s basically what swirls through my head on a daily basis when I spend an absurdly inordinate amount of time of my life cleaning up after other people.  I try not to think about it too much, but the reality is that so many people in my life are basically slobs.  Family, friends, my own household, it’s like everyone I know has way more shit than they know what to do with, and as a result, it’s just piles of said shit all over the place.  And it’s like I’m not only a player who has my own set of tasks and duties to do, but I’m also The Janitor on top of it all, and having to do all of the tasks and duties of The Janitor, except I still only have the number of movement and action moves of one player.

It’s often overwhelming and always frustrating, and I try on a daily basis to keep my head above water over the endlessly growing piles of waste that accumulate and clog up my board in an endless cycle.  More often than not, I don’t get to do any of the actions of my primary class, because I’m using all of my actions being The Janitor, cleaning up the endless shit that keeps materializing around me, while having to be tactical and cerebral on what has to go versus what I can push off onto a later player phase.

And if I were to ever be killed or eliminate from the game?  There’s absolutely no doubt that the same thing would happen to my home as what would happen in the game when The Janitor is removed from play.  Shit would start to accumulate and accumulate, and with nobody to give a shit about actually cleaning up and eliminating some of it on a regular basis, the home would eventually become overwhelmed, and I don’t even want to think about what would happen if that were the case.

In the past, I used to be critical of Marie Kondo and her whole spiel of get the fuck rid of everything.  I criticized her Netflix show but watched more episodes than I care to admit, and then laughed when she had kids and admitted to being just like all of us other parents who get overwhelmed and start accumulating more shit than she knew what to do with.

But as my life has progressed through the 2020’s, the more I wish my life were closer to being able to pulling a KonMari than not.  I’d probably need an entire dumpster to purge my home of all the shit that I know we don’t need, and pretty much only then, would The Janitor be able to take a backseat to whatever class I’m really meant to be, I don’t know fucking know anymore, because I’ve been The Janitor for so long now that I guess I don’t really have another player class anymore.

lol, I love to see the Dodgers lose

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In case you missed it because I did too: the Disney Anaheim Angels of Southern Orange County Los Angeles sweep the Los Angeles Dodgers over the weekend

Unsurprising, this is what happens when a team gets good, succeeds, spends boatloads of money, signs all the notable free agents and becomes the internal darlings of the league they’re in – they mostly become reviled by fanbases that are not supporters of them in the first place.

I mean, I wasn’t really ever a Dodgers fan at any point of my life with the closest thing to support being when Chan Ho Park was there, but for the most part, I just never really cared about them.  They were a fringe team that played in a weak division and never seemed like they were any threat to actually succeed, especially when the Phillies bounced them every time they ran into each other in the playoffs.

But then they eventually got their shit together, started making the playoffs every single year, basically bounced the Braves from them every time they encountered each other except for 2021, and had been enjoying a renaissance of sorts.  I started to dislike them.

Then, they poached Freddie Freeman from the Braves, which wasn’t entirely their fault as much as the Braves being the Braves, meaning the cheapskate fucks that absolutely will not spend money on a free agent that isn’t at their peak, but for all intents and purposes, the Dodgers took the heart out of Atlanta, and I really disliked them.

And then their organization deployed a pelican strike on the league by exploiting deferred money deals to avoid luxury tax penalties while at the same time securing massive money deals on just about every notable free agent on the market, most notably getting Shohei Ohtani for $700 million dollars, en route to committing over a billion dollars on free agents.

By this point, if baseball fans that weren’t Dodger fans already didn’t dislike the Dodgers, this is where they really began to.

It’s not that they’re cheating or doing anything at all that’s not legal, it’s just that they’re really driving home the reality of the importance of spending money, and there’s a lot of misguided frustration and hatred for their own teams, being directed at the Dodgers, but the bottom line is that the Dodgers have basically become the most hated team in the league, even more than the Yankees depending on whom you ask.

So that’s why it’s so satisfying to see when the Dodgers perform like anything other than the team that outspent the rest of the league to construct an uber-roster, and not just get swept at home, but get swept at home to their in-city archnemeses, in the Angels.  And not just the Angels, but the lowly Angels who have 2/3 the payroll of the Dodgers, as well as have a living leech on the squad in Anthony Rendon who is getting paid $38M to not play at all. 

And to top it off, the Angels were without superstar Mike Trout, who is also on the disabled list, and they still took the Dodgers behind the toolshed to shellack them, in their own house no less.

I didn’t catch a single game, much less even know about it after the fact, but I just fucking love it all the same, and it does bring me great joy to see the Dodgers fuck up in such a monumental manner.  It’s just so hilarious because the TL;DR of the whole thing is that the Angels suck and the Dodgers don’t, but the Angels still swept them. 

It’s as big of an upset as the Pistons beating the Lakers in 2003, whenever Tom Brady had a brainfart and lost to the Dolphins, or when the Honda Civic beat the Ferrari in a drag race in that one video clip that was ever only available on fucking RealPlayer.

When the season is over, the Dodgers will still most likely be in World Series contention, while the Angels probably won’t even be close to even the play-in series, but for one weekend in May, the Dodger-hating contingent of baseball fans can all collectively point and laugh at the Dodgers and all their shitty soft-ass fairweather fans.

Nobody feels bad for the Dodgers when they don’t succeed, and it is always joyous to see them lose, but getting swept at home by the rival Angels, is probably going to be the lowest point for the squad this season.  And I love to see it.

Shitty game alert for parents: Donut Dash by Goliath Games

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My kid begged and whined for us to get this game.  And seeing as how it was on deep discount at the death row of JoAnn’s, we acquiesced, because nowadays, anything that can occupy and entertain my children for more than two seconds is considered a win, and which is why my house feels like a future episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive, is because it’s so full of shit like this.

Mythical wife has this funny habit, where she’ll buy things for the kids, but then just kind of hand them off or leave them for me or the au pair to give to the kids, or in some cases, just kind of give the things to the kids and let them tear into the boxes and packages because they love to do that kind of shit.  But in most cases, that’s not always the best idea, because games aren’t made to be immediately played right out of the box, now more than ever, and this fucking game, Donut Dash, is among the worst I’ve ever experienced.

The above image I made pretty much gets right to the point on why this game blows, because there are no batteries included, and worse off, there are a ton of stickers in the box that need to be affixed to very specific things, like the little car, as well as decorating each and every single one of the 22 donuts included in the game.  And my kids love fucking stickers, and it took less than 10 seconds for them to start peeling them up and affixing them to absolutely anything but their intended objects, and I spent an inordinate amount of time, obviously annoyed, trying to carefully peel and correct sticker placement onto the bullshit donuts that couldn’t possibly have been bothered to have that kind of shit printed on, on perhaps cardboard instead of shitty plastic.

And when I read how the game actually played, I could already see in my head upon reading that the car shot the discs out in random directions, that this game wouldn’t last five minutes before we lost one or more of these stupid donuts.

That is, if the dumb car didn’t jam immediately, because of the donuts that my kids put stickers on themselves poorly stuck to the inside of the well, clogging immediately, once again requiring parental intervention to fix it.

I actually didn’t stick around for the actual play of the game, but when I came back home later in the afternoon, I found at least three donuts randomly on the ground, and I imagine that there’s probably others underneath the refrigerator, under the area rugs, and undoubtedly underneath the couch.  And the kids were completely uninterested in it any further, and I opted to just box it back up, and put it away, because as far as I’m concerned, Donut Dash is a colossal piece of shit and a waste of money, even if it was down to just $8.

The point is, this is an awful fucking game, not just for the kids who will lose interest in a fifth of the time it takes to properly set it up, but the parents who not only will pay for it, but are also the ones who will be responsible for said proper set up, lest the kids like my own fuck it all up from the on set, which I would highly recommend not allowing to be the case, if one was still so inclined to want to give this turd a try.

Dad Brog (#150): Next stop, kindergarten

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I blinked a few times, and now my eldest daughter has graduated pre-K, and is en route to starting kindergarten the next school year.  I still have a hard time digesting that, considering that the last five years have soared by, where my kids were born the generation of COVID babies, and the world has gone through a whole lot of hoopla to get to where we are today.

Like, it didn’t feel that surreal when #1 began 2K and went onto 3K while #2 started a year later, but more recently, it dawned on me when I went to the last Friday sing-along of the year, that this was also the final Friday sing-along for #1 outright.  Very soon, the school year was going to come to a close, and all the classmates she’s mostly had over the last three years, almost all of them are going their separate ways, since being a private pre-K, kids are from all over the place, and despite the fact that this school is zoned for a specific elementary school, almost none of them will actually be going there.

Obviously, #1 doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that she’s not going to be seeing a lot of her classmates again with any regularity very soon, and instead it’s me the parent that feels sentimental for her that she’s not going to be seeing her friends, some of whom she’s grown quite close with over the years, and we as the parents can all tell each other that this doesn’t have to be the end, but much like our own adult relationships, it basically is.

Such is the relentless passage of time and the journey of life, and my first kid has completed one of the first stages of life, being preschool.  She’s a whip-sharp, intelligent and observant kid, that has a beautiful imagination, loves to draw and paint, and I’m often floored at the academic development she’s shown over the last three years of preschool, and it’s going to be all sorts of emo-dad emotions in the future to see what she does next, starting elementary school.

As most parents aside from myself probably opine at similar circumstances, I just can’t believe that time has flown so fast, and I’ve already got a kindergartener on deck.  Aside from the financial alleviation of having one less kid in a private pre-K, it’s going to be exciting to see what lies ahead in the future as #1 takes the step into the next stage of life, entering contemporary education.

Cute, but not accurate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

OutKick: Tampa Bay Rays have their first rain delay in the franchise’s history, commemorative ponchos handed out to all 17 of their fans in attendance

I haven’t written much about baseball this season, but then again, I don’t really feel like I’ve written that much over the last few weeks but I digress.  But because a hurricane obliterated Tropicana Field, the dump of a venue that housed the Tampa Bay Rays, the team had been forced to play the entirety of their home games in the 2025 season, at of all places, the Yankees’ Spring Training facilities, Steinbrenner Field.

That being said, seeing as how the Trop was an indoor ballpark, and Steinbrenner Field is very much outdoor, it’s actually kind of amazing that it’s taken this long for the weather to come into play in Florida of all places, and the Rays to deal with a rain delay.  But for all intents and purposes, the franchise has declared it as the first rain delay in Rays history, and to commemorate the tongue-in-cheek occasion, all 17 fans in attendance were given commemorative ponchos, which is actually kind of cool and definitely clutch because rain at pretty much any other ballpark in the country is an instant cash-grab for the venues to be able to hawk overpriced trashbags and umbrellas on the bad luck of those not prepared for potential rain.

However, I’m going to piss on this little parade and go all well actually, because not only was this not the first time a Rays game has been delayed on account of the rain, I can actually say that I was there when it had happened.

It was in 2009, when I was still freelancing, and was having kind of a chill summer vacation on account of being in between assignments and coasting off of a giant payday I made from a project I had completed earlier in the year.  I had money, I had time, I had my Delta flight benefits, and I didn’t want to let the entire summer go by without capitalizing on my advantages at being able to tackle some baseball parks on my quest to visit all 30.

I got to Tampa Bay and basically went straight to the Trop since I didn’t have any time to tourist around like I normally like to do on my baseball trips.  I lucked into a paper World Series of a pitching matchup between Roy Halladay, then with the Blue Jays, and David Price, when he was still the man in St. Pete’s.  Long story short, the game went about six innings of a matchup as good as it was on paper, but unbeknownst to me, the skies had opened up and it was absolutely pouring outside the ceiling of the dome above me.

And then suddenly, there was an announcement over the PA system, and security started going onto the field, and players started coming off of it.  Apparently, on account of the weather, there was a power outage somewhere in the Trop, and despite the fact that nobody could tell where it was, the ballpark felt it prudent to stop the game until the technical difficulties could be resolved.

Despite the fact that the baseball game was being played indoors, the rain had affected something mechanically in the venue, and the venue chose to halt the game in order to fix it.  And there we have it, a rain delay – at an indoor park.

I have no idea if this was the first time that such had happened, but I’m going to assume probably not.  But the point remains is that just because rain isn’t pouring all over the players and fans doesn’t mean that a rain delay couldn’t not happen.  Perhaps if the Rays commemorated something not named the first-ever rain delay, it would be more accurate, but as cheeky as this little “celebration” was, it was very much not accurate.

I know this for fact, because I was there when it happened before, almost 15 years ago.  Shit, Jerome.