Author: dannyhong

Great, now I have to defend the influencer

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t think I’d find a way to organically work this Keyboard Warriors logo I made into a post, and would have to dedicate an entire post to it, but sometimes the internet provideths

The skinny: 21-year old TikTok influencer makes posts about purchasing a home free and clear, The Internet responds with venom, resulting in the influencer tearfully apologizing for being out of touch with people with don’t make as much money as her

Welp, I never thought I’d ever be in the position for wanting to defend an influencer, but here we are.  I’m on the side of the influencer, and when it really comes down to it, I just feel that everyone who is throwing stones her way is, a jealous fatty.

Because I’ve seen enough people do exactly what this little chica does whenever they buy a home: they fucking announce it to the world on social media, because no matter what way you put it, it is a tremendous achievement, that anyone who gets into the position of entering homeownership should be proud of.

I purchased my first home at 22 years of age.  I obviously wasn’t an influencer or in any field nearly as lucrative as this kid was in, and I most definitely wasn’t free and clear from the onset.  But I still delved into the world of homeownership at a very young age, and it was truly for the best as I’d begun accumulating experience that I feel has been valuable as I’d evolved my living situations since then.

The influencer isn’t really that special in the sense that she got a home at a young age.  Any 20-something that’s remotely responsible with their finances could probably make it happen.  The only real difference between her and the vast majority of the world is that she happens to make her living in a form that is oft-seen as insufferable, obnoxious, and generally not popular with the cynical segment of the world, in spite of the fact that those who succeed at it tend to make lucrative livings from doing such.

And this is where I think it’s pretty petty, ripe with jealousy, and sour grapes from the people who are casting rocks in her direction, but mostly jealousy at the fact that she has managed to get into a position to where she could achieve free and clear homeownership.  I mean, I’m envious over the fact that she’s free and clear, but I don’t hold it against her; if I had the ability to just completely pay off my mortgage, I’d most definitely wipe that shit out too.

But it sucks that she has to endure such abuse from the peanut gallery, just because she happened to have gotten the right combination of finding a working formula, luck in gaining exposure, and the appeal to get lucrative sponsorships and means to make the copious amounts of money needed to afford the lifestyle.  Because I’d wager my house that anyone who flung bile at her, if they were in her position, they’d most definitely be buying real estate and doing exactly what she did too.

The fact that she felt the need to apologize was completely unnecessary and I don’t think she owes anyone an apology for being successful.  And I’m spending a lot more time white knighting for this kid than I thought I would deem necessary, but the point is, this is a scenario where The Internet sometimes makes the wrong choices of picking people to vilify, and picking on an influencer just because the majority of the people wish they could have her success, is one of them.

Now wait for her adventures as the world of homeownership comes closing in on her.  Home repairs, being responsible for fucking everything in the house, taxes, homeowner associations or any of the niggling things about homeownership that often makes us sometimes go “I understand the appeal of renting,” begins.  That can be the content insufferable anons can get up on their high horses about instead, but those who have already taken first swings, are already playing from behind.

I love that this is happening to the Giants

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Edge complains about how much the San Francisco Giants suck this year, and how much it sucks that their ballpark is getting overrun by Dodgers fans

Okay obviously it’s not actually wrestling superstar Edge, but it’s some other schmuck out in San Francisco who’s name also happens to be Adam Copeland, but that’s all I needed to get started with making this post.

I’ll be honest though, the guy does make some valid points, and it’s not just some fairweather baseball fan who has abandoned ship because the team isn’t the championship juggernaut it was throughout the 2010 decade where won three World Series.  It is frustrating to watch your team not only lose frequently, but lose in manners in which winning conditions could have been attained, but failed.

Bonus points for the reference to the minor league no-hitter that I posted about a week ago, where a team didn’t notch a hit but still scratched together seven runs and won their game. 

From the points that Edge this guy brings up, he does have reason to be frustrated and aggravated with his team.  But we’re not here to talk about that nonsense, what I really wanted to zero in on was the underlying message that Giants fans have begun doing what I’ve always pegged them as: being fickle, fairweather bandwagon fans who only liked the team when they were championship contenders, and now that they suck, are nowhere to be seen; allowing for the scenario that Edge this guy was also unhappy about, where Dodger fans basically took over AT&T Oracle Park.

Granted, most fans of all teams of all sports are generally such types of fans, but Giants fans love, love to arrogantly pride themselves on being intelligent, statistic-savvy, analytical as well as hip and down with whatever climates of the internet are in circulation.  As much as Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox and Cubs fans are so often seen as fratty, degenerate and some of the most oppressive fanbases in baseball, Giants fans are easily the most arrogant, douchey, hipster fanbase in the league.

But when it really comes down to it, they’re still no different than any other fanbase in any sport, and when the team starts to suck and the wins don’t seem as given as they once might have been, they’re nowhere to be seen. 

And it sucks having your team’s home park invaded and overrun by visiting fans; I’ve been to my share of games against the Cubs and Yankees, whose fans travel among the best out there, and I’ve seen my share of purposefully organized invasions of Philadelphia fans to sports arenas in Maryland and Washington DC.  It sucks seeing all these outside tourists, emboldened by the presence of their fandom brethren, and triple worse if they are on the winning side.

I have no sympathy for the Giants or their spoiled and smarmy, arrogant, douchey, hipster fans.  Any of them so unhappy with the team doesn’t even have to look back a decade to see when the good times were present, multiple times, and if they can’t analyze and understand that it’s simply impossible for any team to dominate like the Celtics or Yankees once did in today’s sport environments, they not as smart of fans as they might think they are.

Motherfuckers can sit on their fists and pump pump pump pump pump pump pump, and then jump jump jump jump jump jump jump, which is still one of the most embarrassing in-between inning segments of entertainment I’ve ever witnessed at a ballpark during my ballpark travels.

Beef: Great show, hits a little too hard for me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw a trailer for Netflix’s Beef, I didn’t know much else about the plot other than the fact that the general introduction to the plot was two people having a chance road rage encounter, and it supposedly escalating to comedic hijinks.  But now that I’m finished with the show, yes, the general boiled down plot of it does remain similar to the early perception of what the show could’ve been, but it was also way more complex, way more substantial, way more important for Asian representation on camera, and most notably, way more relatable to Asians, to admittedly uncomfortable levels at times.

Don’t get me wrong, as a whole, I loved Beef.  It was a fantastic show.  But at the same time, it dove into some topics and had dialogue and situations where it kind of mind-fucked me at just how targeted this felt, beyond the fact that the male lead’s name is Danny and he’s Korean, but obviously I know I’m far from the only person much less Asian person who probably deals with a lot of these thoughts, emotions and struggles to where a plot like this can probably impact a lot of people out there.

Aside from the praise for the strong writing and the strong performing of all actors in the show, one thing that I appreciated the most about the show is just how casually but impactfully demolishes the door of Asian stereotypes in film and television, on a global basis.  Koreans in media in both Korea and America are often set to a lot of unwritten rules and guidelines, like when it comes to physical intimacy, sex and dialogue.  When I was growing up and seeing Korean shows or dramas that my mom or grandma would watch, and seeing any sort of meaningful relationships much less physical intimacy just didn’t happen.

As countless American articles have called out, Asian representation in American media is even worse, and Asian men get it the worst, being emasculated left and right, causing generations of Americans to see Asian men as a bunch of auto-cuckold wimps by default.

Beef just goes on like none of the old rules or bars ever existed, and it’s a breath of fresh air to see people, regardless of race, acting like the people of today would conduct themselves.  Danny is allowed to be emotional, introspective and have flaws.  Amy is allowed to be a breadwinner, the alpha in her marriage and stand up to men fearlessly.  Paul is allowed to be sexy and naïve, and I’m glad to see him fight the good fight to hopefully paint Korean men as anything other than either overweight comic sidekick, or a plastic-molded K-pop boy band member.

AND THERE’S FUCKING SEX in the show, involving Asian people, and it’s not like a sensual love making scene to IU singing in the background.  It’s emotional and raw and actual fucking like you’d see in real American media between non-Asian people.  I’m not writing this fact to try and be funny and make this post memorable or anything, it’s that such occurrences really are so rare, that I feel the need to really hammer it out and make sure it’s known.

And in spite of all the heavy swings the show does to break a lot of molds of Asian representation, the show still takes plenty of time to really tell the stories of the Asian sides of all the characters.  The importance of church to Korean-Americans.  The fetishization of Japanese culture when it comes to affluent white people.  And the sheer lack of communication between generations of Asian children with their own parents, which is an unfortunate trope that just about every second-generation Asian child deals with, with their respective parents.

I really enjoyed Beef as a whole.  But I’d be remiss to ignore the fact that on multiple occasions, I found the show really kind of difficult watch and digest at times, just because of the sheer relatability I felt with it.  It was like getting emotionally mind-fucked a few times, and I really wonder if any of my non-Asian friends and extended family that might watch it, will feel the same way I did when watching it.

I’m amazed I managed to write a post about this without resorting to any spoilers, but for what it’s worth to the zero people that read my swill, Beef is something that I highly recommend if you’re in the mood for a dark comedy that relies heavily on dialogue, but is full of substance, humor, and thought-provoking situations.

Bron Breakker looks like a Costco rotisserie chicken

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Was watching a summary of the most recent episode of NXT, and when they got to the segment where a freshly heel-turned Bron Breakker got in the ring to get up in the business of Chase U, all I could think of was just how fucking orange Baby Steiner was.

Like, we’re talking even more orange than the former president guy, so orange that he looks like he belongs on Jersey Shore.  My knee jerk reaction was that he looked like a Costco rotisserie chicken, but one that was left in the oven four minutes past the timer, and whomever was in charge of the cooker at the time went on break to let it simmer in residual heat even longer.

There can’t be any way he thinks he looks good like this.  Sure, he still has the body and musculature of an Adonis, and there’s no denying the in-ring talent and he’s only going to get better with experience.  But the fact that he still looks like overcooked poultry certainly can’t help his career where appearances aren’t everything, but they still do hold a tremendous amount of weight.

And considering the tremendous heat on his family’s name with his dad going full bigot at a wrestling convention during Wrestlemania weekend, Steiner Jr. should be avoiding all possible sources of negative perception, including the ridicule and embarrassing things, like being the exact same color as a Costco rotisserie chicken.

Seriously, zero color correction went into these images.  I screen capped NXT, and shopped in an unedited photograph of a Costco chicken on top of it.  133 and 1/3% color match.

The fresh contract tanking has begun

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Poor baby: Dansby Swanson cites exhaustion for pulling out of the sixth inning of a game against the Mariners

Here’s the kicker: this was the 11th game of the season.  Out of 162, plus playoffs if the Cubs can be good enough to get in.  There’s a long way to go before the season is over, and things are only going to get harder as the weather gets harder, the days start piling up, and the wear and tear of an entire season begins to pile up.

Exhausted after just eleven games into the season; as the kids say, the fuck out of here.  He cites excuses like his MLS wife’s knee injury and subsequent surgery as reasons for him not getting adequate rest before playing baseball as if him and his wife weren’t both professional athletes who don’t understand that all they do to make egregious amounts of money is play sports, and that all they really have to worry about is keeping themselves healthy and contributing and that injuries to occasionally happen.

What we’re more likely witnessing here is the start of the traditional tanking, sandbagging, talent suppression or whatever you want to call it, of a professional athlete, fresh off of signing a big money contract.  As most baseball fans in Atlanta know, Dansby Swanson left the Braves and signed with the Chicago Cubs on a seven year, $177 million contract, which I was tepidly sad to see a key contributor to the championship team depart, but the bean counting stathead I can occasionally be, relieved that the Braves don’t have to be responsible for that deal, especially for a guy I just never got any impression really had his heart with the team as much as he was chasing dollars not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But now that he’s got his big money guaranteed deal, Dansby Swanson really has nothing to play for.  He’s going to get paid $20M regardless if he hits .309 with 29 home runs or hits .209 with 211 strikeouts.  There’s absolutely no incentive for him to go balls out in every game until around 2028, when he begins creeping closer to the end of his deal, and he’s going to want to try and prove that he’s got talent to contribute to someone, and possibly land one more multi-million-dollar deal before the sun sets on his career.

And this is nothing we haven’t seen before in the grand spectrum of the professional sports landscape, it’s a practice that nobody admits to but everyone knows happens, and it doesn’t matter if it’s baseball, football or basketball, as long as it’s played professionally and there’s money to be made from gamesmanship, the players are doing it.

The thing is, I’ve never seen such a flagrantly low-effort excuse than exhaustion after 11 games into a season before, which is what prompted this post coming into existence.  Usually, players just loaf and claim to start slow, and if there’s any sort of injury or ailment, milk that cow until it’s shriveled like a raisin before easing their way back into being forced to earn their money again.  They don’t just straight up recuse themselves from an active game and just say they were exhausted, because again, professional athletes are supposed to be the cream of the crop and the greatest athletes in their world.  Not bitches who get exhausted after 11 games into a baseball season.

But then again, Dansby Swanson knows there’s no incentive to even trying to hide it, so he just lets loose with a lame excuse.  Much like my perceived opinion of his attitude of playing for the Braves, apparently, there’s little heart that goes into his excuse making to justify his fresh contract tanking either.

Dad Brog #109: My kids seem to only have my weaknesses

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Up until recently, I’ve been thinking that #2 seemed to be the more sturdy of my daughters, seeing as how #1 can’t eat eggs without it coming back out in some unpleasant fashion.  She gets this unfortunate ailment from me, seeing as how almost to the day I turned 30 years old, my body has decided to revolt against eggs.  I can still eat things with eggs as an ingredient to a small extent, but I can’t fry up eggs or hard boil them and eat them without a fairly predictable and unpleasant result a few hours later.

Some say that peoples’ dietary tendencies have a tendency to change every 7-10 years, but it was actually very recently where I indulged in a quiche, and most definitely paid for it later in the day.  A decade later and my body still doesn’t like dealing with eggs any more than when I was 30.

However, not only can #2 eat eggs, she loves them.  Scrambled, fried, Korean-souffle style, she really enjoys eggs, and doesn’t have any ill effects like her sister or dad does.  For that reason alone, I figured she was the more resilient child.

Until just a day ago, I was getting texts from my au pair asking if #2 had any allergies.  Subsequent photos came in, and there were some rashes on my daughter that were unnerving to see, resulting in me leaving work early and taking her in to urgent care, because I wanted to get some professional opinion on what I was already suspecting.

At the tail end of the cruise, my group did a load of laundry on the ship, so that we could get it out of the way while on the ship, as well as the fact that with as many outfit changes my kids were doing, we had to.  As is often the case with lots of cruises, nothing is free, and I had to purchase an individual wash cycle, a dryer cycle, and because we didn’t bring any, some laundry detergent, which was a plain, regular single-serving size of Tide.

Long story short, I quickly pieced things together, and made an educated guess that it was a detergent-related rash that #2 was dealing with, because some articles of clothing from the cruise laundry were coming back into circulation, as well as the fact that, not specifically with Tide, but again, a detergent allergy is something that has happened to me before as well.

In my case, it’s Purex, or whatever the fuck they put in their formula, that triggers my body to have a rather unpleasant hives-ey/rash-ey reaction, and it’s pretty evident that Tide has the same effect on my daughter.

Needless to say, swapping out the afflicted articles and replacing them with not-Tide washed bedding and clothes have already stabilized things, and I’ve learned that Tide is 100% on the blacklist for shopping in the future

But it’s apparent that my second child has picked up a weakness from her dad, just like her sister has.  It’s too early to tell yet, but I’m hoping, considering how much they’re already taking after me, that they get some of my strengths and don’t just continue to grow with weaknesses of mine without any sort of balance.

Get no-hit, still win game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is why baseball is so great: Minor league Chattanooga Lookouts defeat the Rocket City Trash Pandas despite getting no-hit, 7-5

There’s so much to love about this whole debacle.  Baseball is the one sport where things seem to go tits up and oddities occur way more frequently in any other sport.  Perhaps the dynamic of the game allows for weird shit and anomalies to occur than all the others, but all the same, it tends to feed the narrative about how there’s always to be had at every single game.

Sure, it’s easy to get caught up in the epic name “Rocket City Trash Pandas” which used to be the boring old Huntsville Stars, and I’m sure there are hipsters out there who want to declare this an unofficial no-hitter because it occurred in a 7-inning game, which means it was probably on a doubleheader day since that’s the rule in MiLB, but it doesn’t change the fact that the ending of the game caps off a fantastic example of a baseball shit show, one that I could only have wished to have been able to have seen live in person.

I can only imagine the excitement of the likely small crowd, at feeling like they were on the cusp of seeing not just a win, but a no-hitter, seeing as how they were up 3-0 going into the final frame.  But then baseball being baseball, and the inconsistent level of talent at the minor league level, suddenly comes a barrage of walks and guys getting hit by pitches, and suddenly the shutout is gone, and the Lookouts are making the game very interesting.

And then comes the center fielder completely missing a layup of a flyball which should have ended the inning and preserved the win and the no-hitter, and the Trash Pandas are now suddenly down to the visitors.  Moar bullshittery occurs, and when the dust settled, the Trash Pandas were now on the wrong end of a 7-3 score.  The only thing that was certain, barring a miraculous tie in the bottom of the inning, was the no-hitter that was somehow preserved, since in spite of the seven runs that had scored, nobody had gotten a hit.

Naturally since baseball is the cruelest sport of them all, the bottom of the 7th still saw the Trash Pandas not go out without a fight, and they scratched out two runs to close the gap before the Lookouts closed out the game.  That they won without a hit.  So the fans that were there, not only went from elated to shocked, they also had their hopes brought back up with a small comeback, only to be extinguished a second time.

I barely watch any baseball or any sports as it is anymore, because being a dad comes first and foremost, but it’s instances like this are what always entertain, keep me engaged, and feel the worth of keeping my ear to the ground.  Baseball is awesome, and this is a story that has the potential to be a genuine never-be-broken instance, or at least an extremely obscure trivia answer.