Author: dannyhong

5 associate degrees? Why no bachelor??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sauce: 12-year old California tryhard kid graduates from community college with five associates degrees

It seems like every single year, people get more and more competitive about academic achievements, but to a degree where it’s not actually cool anymore, and just kind of attention seeking and insufferable.  And the internet doesn’t help, as there are countless platforms for these tryhards to flex and humblebrag about the things they’re accomplishing; don’t get me wrong, it’s great that people are flexing something useful like educations, but if they’re only doing it for the sake of getting people to sing their praises then it’s really no different than inventing an obnoxious viral dance or something.

Here in Atlanta, every year, my old neighborhood’s Nextdoor feed has become this escalating pissing contest of parents sharing stories or flexing their kids’ accomplishments of how many acceptances and how much scholarship dollars the local high school graduates are.  It has literally escalated every year, and for every person who loves to proclaim their kid got into every single Ivy League school and has amassed over $1M in scholarship offers, there’s two other kids who have been accepted into 20+ schools and has totaled over $2M in scholarship offers.  And the ships sail endlessly as people resort to internet passivity to vent before someone inevitably says can’t we all just get along???

Obviously, this behavior is not exclusive to Atlanta, and throughout the years, we’ve seen all sorts of tryhards who have turned educational achievements into sport itself, and all across the country there are people who are always trying to out-do and one-up everyone else with college acceptances, scholarship values, how many degrees, youngest to do something, oldest to accomplish X, etc, etc.

But shoutout to this 12-year out in California who managed to notch his fifth associates degree from Fullerton College, which sounds and is kind of impressive in its own right, seeing as how he’s only 12.  But then the low hanging fruit of jokes channels my inevitable becoming a high-expectations Asian dad, and wondering why his Asian parents seem to be okay with him taking a victory lap on the internet when all he’s accomplished were a handful of associates degrees.

Not even bachelor’s degrees!  WTF?

Of course, regardless of the snarky shade, he’s still set up perfectly to transition into actual college eventually, and I’m imagining that a large part of this game is to be able to transfer the evident butt ton of credits that he’s amassed from community college into an actual bachelor’s program, and he’ll still inevitably graduate from a real college well before he’s 18.

But the thing is that his motivation for embarking on such a tryhard path really wasn’t so much the fact that he wanted to learn faster and reach adulthood in a better place than most, as much as he heard that some 13-year old had done it, and he wanted to match or exceed them.  So it’s like, did he really, learn anything, as much as he checked off boxes and requirements for degrees, so he could beat someone else, or was he just basically trying to speed run through community college in order to have bragging rights?

Regardless, it’s all way too tryhard, way too obnoxious, and frankly a disservice to parenthood and raising a child in my opinion.  The boy probably has no friends and no social skills from being either taught at home by Asian parents or being surrounded by much older teens and young adults all through his college journey, and even if he is the wunderkind, when there’s no more school to be had, will probably end up as a sad sack adult with a whole lot of catching up with living amongst human beings, all because he and his family were caught up with trying to better someone else instead of bettering their kid.

When my kids are nine-years old, I’m hoping they’re finishing up the third grade, and have friends and peers their own age.  If they’re smarter than the curve, we’ll assess how to challenge them appropriately, but I’m pretty sure sending either my kids off to community college probably isn’t going to be on the table.  Meanwhile, by then, this tryhard kid will probably be 18 with a college degree, and completely incapable of getting a job, because he will be a social skill invalid, have no ability to interview or interact with other human beings, and end up working at his parents’ business whatever, stereotypical Asian one they’re in.

When you try hard, you die hard.

An $80,000 Volkswagen Golf LOL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always been a fan of the VW Golf, or as the hipster in me still likes to refer to them as Rabbits.  The boy racer that I once pretended like I was loved their versatility, tunability, the hatchback experience, and their general performance for a car that was the slightly more upscale alternative to the Honda fandom.  The only thing that ever prevented me from ever owning my own was simply the fact that I just couldn’t ever afford to get a Volkswagen, because whenever I’d been in the market for a car, they were always at a price point that I didn’t feel comfortable committing to.

And then I read this story about a super-limited edition Golf going to be released, to where only 333 will be produced, a pithy number as if they thought they were Bugatti or Lamborghini or something, will be a sickly-looking greenish yellow and will cost roughly the equivalent of $80,000 USD, and I roll my eyes and come to the conclusion that I will probably never own a Golf in my life, and think about how the car and its branding have seemingly grown a little too big for its britches.

Much like the Honda Civic, the VW Golf has long since strayed from its general position in their respective automotive lineups.  Originally the economical, entry-level compact options for their makers, both of them have grown up substantially with the generations and have turned into ridiculously expensive budget sport cars where honestly, their name is more valuable than the sum of the parts that they’re composed of.

But $80k is absurd.  Asinine.  Completely ridiculous and out of touch.  I wasn’t a fan of Honda finally bringing the Civic Type-R to America, only to turbo charge it and slap a $45k price tag on it, but at least it’s not an $80,000 Golf.

$80K is like Supra territory.  Numerous BMW and Mercedes options.  The price point of importing a R32 Nissan Skyline and taking care of all associated costs and maintenance.  Nearly double of what my car cost for 1/3 of the capacity and utility.  Nearly double the cost of the Audi that I would much rather have.  Hell, it’s nearly double the cost of the R32 Golf which was already the super version of the Golf, and for what?  19 extra horsepower, that most people wouldn’t be able to legally capitalize without breaking the law?

And all for a Volkswagen Golf.  The econobox hatchback that was every person my age’s first car type of car.  No fucking thanks, although I will be interested the kinds of schmucks out there who will inevitably hoover up these 333 krauts.  I can only imagine the wildly varied types of bullshit they’ll tell themselves and others to justify dropping $80k on a gaudy fluffed out Golf.

WWE’s new blets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have to say, I’m very entertained by what the WWE has been doing over the last few months, with their management of their slew of championships.  Roman Reigns has had such a chokehold over the two world championships that the company is forced to introduce a new world-equivalent championship.  The RAW women’s champion is on Smackdown and the Smackdown women’s champion is on RAW.

And now, in honor of Roman Reigns’ aforementioned chokehold over the company’s world championships having surpassing 1,000 days, the WWE has decided to fold his two blets into a singular championship, and awarded him with a brand new, gold variant of The Logo blet, and are calling it the Undisputed Championship or at least that’s what the blet itself says.

I guess the Universal championship is kind of dead at this point, but I’m sure the WWE will rewrite the history books in some convoluted manner to make sure all holders of all variants of the title that have ever been folded in are accounted for except Chris Benoit.

The best part is though, with the Roman’s two blets now merged into one blet, he or Paul Heyman are looking a little inadequate when it comes to hardware.  So it’s good that the WWE introduced another world championship blet, because that way Roman can get back to being a dual blet holder in due time.  And I am here for it, for when Roman Reigns inevitably becomes WWE Undisputed World Heavyweight Universal Champion.

The funniest thing about all this blet shuffling is that I have no doubt in my mind that a lot of it is driven by the need for fresh merch.  Prior to the introduction of these two new blets, the WWE had basically made replicas of every active blet in the company, and had nothing new in the pipeline.  I’m guessing the parade of bullshit tribute blets, SEC college blets, and like the three MLB collaboration blets haven’t exactly been lighting the world on fire, so if WWE Shop wants to have some high-dollar items to peddle, they need to start developing some new shit, which is exactly what they’ve done.

My knee-jerk reaction is that I don’t have much interest in either the new big gold blet, or the new big gold blet, especially with their $499 price tag at full retail.  It’s like AEW fucked the market with their ridiculously high-priced replicas, so WWE Shop has taken that as established market and are selling their newer shit accordingly.  But never say never, and if in the 1-2 times a year where they sometimes have some deep price cuts, anything can happen if the inspiration and the financial means lines up just right.

Unsolicited Delivery Advice #001: Never assume a manual tip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I number this as if I plan on ever doing more of these in the future, but you never know.  Ironically if I had any camera presence, I could probably become like TikTok famous for spreading unsolicited advice, but I’m an old dad and don’t want to put forth the hustle to be an obnoxious vlogger of any capacity.

But I still do some gigging on the side, because I like to make a little bit of extra scratch to have hopes of using to buy personal shit for myself, but really it’s mostly to supplement my income and build up a little safety net for all the endless parade of life’s expenses and parenthood.

At this point, I’ve got over 400 deliveries completed in my time doing it, and have a fairly decent grasp of how the whole process works, to the point where I have my own sets of rules and guidelines that I try to adhere to, in order to not burn out and feel like it’s a necessity and not a side hustle.

One of the rules I have is to not accept any shit pings.  The ones that are under $3, because those are almost certainly fares where the cheap motherfucker on the other end has added no tip, and regardless of the fact that I deliver myself, even if I weren’t, I’m 100% on board with the whole notion of no tip, no trip.  If I’m ordering food, I wouldn’t expect anyone to pick up my fare if I’m declaring a $0 tip up front, so cheap assholes out there who don’t tip shouldn’t expect me to pick up their bullshit requests.

The only exceptions to the rule are when there’s a trip bonus in play, and I’m just trying to clear as many trips as possible as to get a bonus from like UberEats or DoorDash, or it’s just such a miserably slow night that I take something just to get on the board.

But for the most part, acceptance rate be damned, if I’m pinged for a fare that’s sub-$3, I’m not only declining it, but I’m cursing the customer out loudly in the confines of my own car, saying shit like they can starve, fuck that, etc.  These cheap fucks all hide behind the veil of anonymity and use it to let their inner stingy cheapskates out, and delivery drivers have it ten times worse than restaurant servers.

Anyway, what prompted this whole post is there was a night that was pretty dreadfully slow.  I had already made a first drop, and I was hoping to pick up a second far so that I could get a pithy $2 trip bonus for making two deliveries.  I get a ping, it’s shit, for $2.83 for Baskin Robbins cakes, but the estimated distance is but two miles, it’s on my way home, so I figure fuck it, I take it, it becomes a $4.83 ping with the bonus, which is still pretty shitty, but at least it’s not a difficult delivery.

Or so I thought. I get into the Baskin Robbins, and the workers tell me they have one of two items, and the cake they wanted, they didn’t have.  So I’m like wtf, I don’t want to cancel the order since I wanted the trip, so they suggest reaching out to the customer.  I text them to let them know that they don’t have the cake they want, and we go back and forth for way longer than $2.83 should’ve gotten them, but the TL;DR is that they pick a different cake that is in stock, their cost doesn’t change, and I’m on my way to drop off.

I get to the house, and of course the instruction is to leave at door; this is what I prefer, but when it’s coming from a no-tipper, it’s obvious that they’re also trying to avoid the shame of facing a person they’re stiffing.  Anyway, I get to the door, and through some windows I can see all these party decorations, and I’m thinking to myself that maybe I just rescued a birthday party or something.  Which explains why the customer was so eager to get any cake at all.

So after dropping off, I’m feeling a little good that maybe there’s a chance that I just saved a party by coming through with the clutch cakes.  And maybe this person will really be one of those customers who love to tell themselves that they don’t tip up front, because they WILL tip afterwards, depending on the level of service received.  And seeing as how I didn’t outright cancel their order, and worked with them to provide an alternate and get their shit to them, I figured my level of service was pretty high.

Obviously this post doesn’t exist if that had happened, and unsurprisingly the cocksucker didn’t tip at all.  I’m not surprised by it one bit, but considering the extra effort I put into their request, I had hopes that this might’ve been the first time that someone recognized it and rewarded it accordingly.

So lesson learned, and lesson to impart: if looks like a shit ping, smells like a shit ping, it most likely is, going to be a shit ping.  Don’t believe that a customer is going to be remotely capable of removing their head out of their own self-absorbed ass to be able to give one iota of consideration of you, the deliverer.  They can’t even be bothered to click a fucking thumbs up after their shit arrives, because you know they’re not going to re-open the app again unless there’s a problem, until they next time they need it, at least a day later. 

In fact, all customers are shitheads (unsolicited advice #002?), and are assumed to be trash unless proven otherwise.  But we still need ‘em, and it’s a vicious cycle in which we co-exist in.

What is leadership?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Overvalued.

Now I could be real nihilistic and period full-stop this post with just that and call it a day, but then it would sound like something traumatic had occurred, and I wanted to be vaguebooking about it or something, which is not accurate at all. 

This post stems from a conversation had over dinner a night ago where it was determined that I lacked ambition, because I don’t really want to strive for any leadership positions in my career. The thing is, I’ve been in positions of leadership already, and although I did take a lot of satisfaction in being the best leader I could and the relationships I cultivated with my reports, it really still amounted to a tremendous addition of stress that I feel is wholly unnecessary at this juncture of my life, and I would much rather just be given objectives and the space and means to do my job to the best of my ability and be for the most part, left the fuck alone.

The problem is that I feel that the working world we live in places a tremendously inflated sense of worth in leadership, and not nearly as much in the ability to get shit done, as in the people with the ability to actually move a company’s objectives forward.  I’ve made no secret that throughout my career, the most difficult people to work for are the people that I know can’t do my job in a moment of need, and I find it tremendously difficult to respect and accept any sort of judgment of my talent from those who have zero idea of what I do.

If I could rephrase my original statement, it’s not that all leadership is overvalued, but there’s just so much piss poor bad leadership exists out there that it just makes me feel like all of it is overvalued, overrated and feeds the narrative to how the working world is just so broken and misguided.

At my previous employer, I was promoted into a position of leadership, which I willingly went into, because I felt that I had reached a ceiling with my entry-level designer role, and I felt ready to move up and try to climb the ladder within the company.  But the thing is that even though I was in a position of leadership, it was always, always important to me that I still know how to do the jobs of my former peers now reports, because there was no way I could be any sort of leader unless I knew the job at the same granular level from those who have to do it.  But because I was promoted from within and I wasn’t brought in to abruptly lead people whom I didn’t know, I felt that I was very successful at being a leader on my team, because everyone knew me, knew my background, and knew that I was good enough to be a decision-maker.  It’s just that I had a massive cunt of a boss above me that actively made my life a living hell to where I had no choice but to cut and run, regardless of how much my team brought satisfaction to me professionally.

So that’s where I’m really going with this, is that it’s not that I lack ambition and don’t want to be a leader, it’s that my whole idea of leadership is that it’s something that grows organically and leadership rises and takes shape, and it’s definitely not something that can just be plugged into a team or a company, by someone who has fluffed up their resumes and qualifications in order to get the job.  That type of leadership is the leadership that I don’t want to strive for, even if it makes it look like I’m not ambitious.

I’d like to work a job where I’m paid well for the work that I do, and I want to get so good at it, that I organically rise to a position of leadership, to where I can lead in the best way that I think I can, which is typically by example, and typically in a servant leader capacity, and not some game-playing schmuck who only knows how to delegate and live in Excel and Outlook all fucking day and have no actual talent.

Unfortunately, like so much world, that’s just now how things operate these days, and short of me winning the lottery, it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be a part of a working world that jives more with my ideals and ideas that work ethic and talent competency is what’s needed, instead of the ability to “play the game” and “it’s who you know” and other flaky bullshit that shapes the job market today.

Dad Brog (#112): The inevitability of needing less sleep

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the last few months, the daily routine has been as such:

  • The girls go to bed at 7 pm
  • At around 10:30 pm I tell myself that I need to start winding down and go to bed early, ultimately do anything but, actually go to bed at around 1 am
  • Alarm #1 goes off at 6 am for me to take dog out
  • Alarm #2 goes off at 7 am which I promptly disable
  • Alarm #3 goes off at 7:10 am and I finally get up
  • Prepare breakfast for the girls
  • #1 usually wakes up by 8 am, promptly comes down to start breakfast
  • #2 is woken up five minutes later, promptly brought down to start breakfast
  • Dad mode engage

It’s not always easy, but it’s the life of parenting.  I wish just once in my life that someone else would do this for one morning without me having to be out of town, but I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon, so every single day of my life for the last year or so has been like this.  Obviously nothing involving kids lasts forever, and I knew that there would come a time in which the schedule was going to start deviating, and I believe that time has finally come. 

Over the last few weeks, more often than it hasn’t, #1 has been waking up earlier and earlier in the mornings, and it sometimes throws a monkey wrench into my morning routine, since when things go tits up and she decides to not be chill in her room and wait until 8 pm, I have to bring her down lest she wakes #2 up earlier than hoped, and she’s a colossal pill while I’m trying to prepare breakfast.  Some mornings she’s cool with hanging out in her room and calmly peruses books or plays with her stuffed animals, but usually she’s up and announcing to the baby monitor that she wants to go downstairs, or just whining loud enough to where I’m worried she’ll wake up her sister and things will really go poorly.

The easy solution is to just start waking up earlier so that I can have my peaceful mornings of calms before the storms of parenting, but I’m already sleep deprived enough, and I really dread the idea of doing it.  I’d definitively have to go to bed earlier in order to accommodate it, but I already feel like I don’t have enough time to myself as it is, and it’s difficult to want to sacrifice even more time for myself when I already feel like I always sacrifice too much of myself already.

I really am harkened to the days of reading old Calvin & Hobbes comic strips where Calvin starts waking up at ass o’clock on weekends much to the chagrin of his parents, and now I’m the square unnamed dad character.  But the mornings of angsty kid and grumbly dad aren’t good for anyone, and something’s got to give eventually, and realistically speaking, it’s most likely going to be me.

Yet another losing faith in humanity scenarios

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In one of my friends group chats, one of my bros posted a picture of himself with a book, attempting to be funny; it’s okay because he’s black obviously.  Now of course there’s a part of me that did think it was funny, but more than that, I had more questions than I thought it was amusing the whole irony of black guy perusing book with inflammatorily racist title.  Namely, the curiosity on if it really were a book with 328 pages with nothing but the N-word in it, or if it were just an attention-grabbing title, with the contents of the book actually being something substantial.

Nope, it was the exact polar opposite in the sense that it actually had absolutely nothing at all inside of it, as in zero text whatsoever, between the header and footer of every page.  And according to Amazon, it’s not even actually 328 pages, so it’s more like 242 blank sheets of paper sandwiched into a book form, and it’s somehow $14.99 on Amazon, and shocking to absolutely nobody is that it’s been purchased enough to have a slew of verified purchasing reviewers doing their best jobs of being internet comics and failing predictably with “reviews” of it.

All the same, what we have here is another classic example of people out there in the world who knowingly put out means for people to spend actual currency that are useless, pointless, known wastes of said currency; and then to no surprise, people go out and actually do it, because they think it’s funny and/or they really are that stupid to where they’re completely at ease with dumping their cash for goods or services that serve no purpose whatsoever, instead of, possibly putting it to any good use at all.  Not for themselves, not for charity, not for anyone at all, but basically the equivalent of knowingly setting their own personal cash on fire.

It’s like the idiots who raised $50,000+ for some clown’s GoFundMe trying to make a potato salad, or that time where Cards Against Humanity had a live-streaming sale where people paid in real-time to keep an excavator operating digging holes for absolutely no reason, or when Cards Against Humanity literally sold nothing for $5 a pop and still raised tons of money.

People just, love to throw their money away, when they think in doing so, they’re in on some clever joke.  And it’s instances like this where it’s apparent that some people have too much money or too little intelligence or both, and it just turns into scenarios where the end result is just a nihilistic feeling of disappointment and losing faith in the species to where people would rather spend $5 on nothing than putting it to absolutely any form of productivity instead.

I know this is rich coming from a person who has spend an inordinate amount of money on replica wrestling belts, but at least those purchases are going to businesses or individuals, or parties where amassing money is some sort of objective, and not knowingly throwing it into a barrel fire.

And here’s the worst part; while looking up the particular book, just to get my facts straight, it turns out that it’s not alone.  I wish I could say I were surprised by this, but of course I’m not surprised, that there are basically two other alternatives, with one of them literally changing out one word and adding “Fun” into it, while the other is just fewer alleged pages.  And that’s just on Amazon alone, I can only imagine how many other copycat “publications” of this same title are floating out there.

Naturally, people are buying them, and aside from disgust, I’m also a little envious in the fact that these clowns are also getting a cut of the purchases of their bad jokes, while I’m struggling to make ends meet every single month and always looking for ways to try and make some extra money in order to have some breathing room.  I can’t say that I wouldn’t be above trying to capitalize on bullshit to make money, but there’d probably be a part of me that wouldn’t want to be a flagrant hypocrite in order to try it out.