Month: April 2017

Oh how different my life could have been

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It begins in Asia: Video games will soon be a medal sport in the 2022 Asian Games

To all you non-Asians, the Asian Games are kind of like a mini-Olympics, but exclusive to, you guessed it, Asia.  There are all sorts of athletic competitions performed at the Asian Games, from baseball, judo, wrestling, weightlifting to gymnastics and ping pong, much like the Olympics.  It’s a very big deal, because it’s not as exclusive as the Olympics can be, so it really gives smaller, lesser-heralded Asian countries opportunities to represent themselves, and it’s where some of the larger countries like Korea and Japan can flex their advancement without competition from the Western world.

But anyway, news comes from the East that by the 2022 Asian Games, eSports might be a category in which countries can participate in.  As in video games; teenagers playing video games featuring characters that are usually athletic to compete against other teenagers playing as athletic characters.  But video games, for actual medals and actual national honors and prestige nonetheless.

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The birthday post

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There are times in which I want to be spoiled and lavished upon from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed.  A Baz Luhrmann party, all my friends having the time of their lives, good times and great memories made to be remembered and reminisced upon until the following year.  I get all the material crap that I’ve ever said I’ve wanted throughout the last year, whether it was legitimate want or I was simply being ironic, for good laughs.  Everyone remembers the date, nothing bad occurs on the day, I don’t get upset, disappointed or frustrated by anything, and I’m left with a feeling that I simply do not deserve any of this.

It’s just an arbitrary day of the year that happens to coincide with the anniversary in which I was born.

The reality is that I have very low and tempered expectations for my birthdays in general, and frankly I’m kind of uncomfortable with any sort of efforts made to draw attention to myself, whether by myself or by anyone else.  I appreciate any and all efforts anyone makes to acknowledge or do nice things for me, but when the day is over, I don’t really expect much, and tend to go through my birthdays with a sense of carefulness and hope that nothing goes wrong.

I guess a lifetime of birthdays being treated like no big deal within my family has engrained this sense that birthdays are truly no big deal to me.  It’s like I feel like they’re not that important, but everyone else seems to treat their birthdays with a little more importance than I would, that I feel like I’m caught in the middle of how I feel like a birthday should be.  But out of fear of being disappointed, I think I have a tendency to downplay and deflect much of the acknowledgment and attention that I get in regards to my own birthday.

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IT’S MARTA HERE TOO

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Alternate route: take MARTA to Midtown or North Avenue stops to avoid sinkhole that has shut down two city blocks worth of Fifth Street

MARTA STRIKES AGAIN (alleged conspiracy theory)!!  Destroying highways wasn’t enough for Keith Parker, now he’s employing the route of sabotaging local roads, playing the card of griefing the locals and their surface streets, with hopes of getting them to use more MARTA as well.

This is actually a great litmus test, to truly compare the infrastructure of an American city compared to a place like Japan, because despite the obvious answer, I get that there is a little bit of unfairness in comparing the repair of a suspension bridge like I-85 isn’t the same comparison as repairing a block-sized sinkhole in Fukuoka.

The question now is how fast can Atlanta repair a sinkhole the size of a Little Caesar’s pizza?  Fukuoka fixed one the size of a regional airport in a week, but I’m going to have to assume Atlanta won’t get theirs fixed in remotely close to a week, and might just need a few million dollars of incentive to drive workers to actually do their job, and maybe by June, Fifth Street will be open again.

Anyone want to take bets on the speed in which it’ll get fixed?  Fuckin’ MARTA.

Their URL says it all

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ITSMARTA(.com)!!!!!!

You heard it here first.  MARTA is behind all of this shit.  The collapse of I-85.  The chemical spill that crippled the Connector.  The seismic buckling of I-20.  It’s MARTA!

Coincidentally, MARTA riders would avoid the entirety of the chemical spill, as well as the smoldering remains of I-85.  Coincidentally anyone traveling westbound of I-20 would avoid the giant fisting the road decided to give motorists, if they rode MARTA from Indian Creek station into the city instead of driving. 

It just seems a little too coincidental that all these highway maladies are occurring in areas where MARTA would make too much of a logical alternative.

Keith Parker is a diabolical son of a bitch, but this guy right here is one step ahead of you at seeing through your transparent guerilla methods of trying to force increased ridership.  Apps, slogans and “riding with respect” only got so much faith back into MARTA, but once he hit the wall, he’s been forced to bring out the big guns.  Literally, by destroying strategic parts of the Metro Atlanta highway system, and then conveniently waiting in the wings to provide this alternative means of transportation, behind his friendly demeanor and sharply dressed image.

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So about all that increased ridership

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Sometimes, nature just takes care of itself: an apparent premeditated gun attack at the West Lake MARTA station results in one dead, several others injured

Yeah, about that thought that maybe MARTA planned the destrucity of I-85 in order to spike its ridership… such may have been the case, but much like using a cheat code Battletoads, sometimes the royal they know that something is amiss, and actions are taken to bring light to it.  MARTA destroys I-85 in order to increase their ridership, and then violence occurs on the trains to take the status quo back to zero; or at least that’s what the point of this whole post is about.

Surely, nothing is going to scare people back away from MARTA than good old fashioned gun violence.  Completely negating the efforts by MARTA to increase their ridership by destroying I-85.  But compared to the risk of getting hit by, stray bullets, I think commuters just might prefer setting in stand-still traffic for hours on end; at least in the confines of your own car, the chances of getting shot are less than being crammed shoulder to shoulder inside of a train car with no automotive skin to shield you from gunfire.

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This is what we call a disaster waiting to happen

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Incentives to rush usually equals incentives for shit work: Georgia Department of Transportation offers up to a $3.1 million dollar bonus to the company responsible for repairing I-85, if they can finish everything up before Memorial Day

Look, I’m all about getting I-85 up and running as quickly as possible.  And my bad on the part of previously saying that it wasn’t going to be done until Thanksgiving, because clearly I tuned out for a little bit and missed where they thought they would get it done by June 15th instead.  Whatever though, it’s not the weekend like the sinkhole was fixed in Japan, so it’s still taking way too fucking long to fix something that should really be fixed even faster than a target date of Memorial Day weekend.

And it’s obvious why Georgia wants I-85 fixed before May 25th, because that’s Memorial Day weekend, one of the heaviest loads of expected traffic all across the nation.  Surely, the loss of I-85 is going to be extremely taxing to I-285 on both sides as people would be forced to use those roads instead of the straight shot through the city itself, which then has a trickle effect on I-20, as well as I-75.  Ironically, those actually in the city of Atlanta itself would probably benefit the most, from prepared drivers not utilizing city proper streets.

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lol Braves #835

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Impetus: Days before the official first-ever Opening Day at ScumTrust Park, where Atlanta traffic will be put to the ultimate test of futility, Interstate 75 is temporarily crippled when a truck carrying boxes of Atlanta Braves foam tomahawks, spills some of its contents onto the highway, forcing closure of two lanes in an extremely congested section the highway

Oh, I can feel the excitement in the air.  The AJC, Atlanta Magazine, WSB, any and every outlet in Atlanta, trying to drum up interest in the impending grand opening of ScumTrust Park.  Trying their best to accentuate the newness of the park, all the things around the ballpark, and doing their best to hide the fact that the traffic will be Snowpocalypse bad, and nothing around the ballpark is actually open.  Not to mention the Braves, who started the season on the road are 1-6 at the time I’m writing this, and are the worst team in the National League and tied for the worst team in the Majors.

Yup, didn’t see any of this coming.

But one thing I didn’t expect to see, but am not the least bit surprised, because “Braves” and “fucking up” seem to go together these days like peas and carrots, was like, a soft opening of shitty traffic, when some boxes of foam tomahawks fell onto I-75 and shut down two lanes in literally the worst possible spot where I-75 and I-285 intersect.

Sure, it was mostly harmless and no foam tomahawk is remotely capable of physically damaging any motorists’ vehicles, but it still provided a nuisance to anyone on the road, and is a nice reminder of the shitshow that the Cobb Braves and their corruption-fueled new ballpark are all about.