Throughout my 82-day journey of re-posting literally ten years’ worth of brog posts, I naturally took the time to go down memory lane and re-read everything I’d written over that time. I think as a whole, the collective brog does paint a decent picture of who I really am, but I’ll also be the first person to admit that hoo-boy, there’s some shit I’ve written in the past that most certainly isn’t the way I think these days.
Inherently, I don’t think people are capable of dramatic change in their lives, but I think it’s fair game to say that opinions most certainly can change throughout time. Environment, influence, and/or just plain growing up, the way people think can harden or soften, or just plain go in different directions as time passes.
I don’t want to one of those people whom when they get become rich, famous and have the spotlight of the internet shone on them (because that’s totally going to happen to me one day), and have their internet history drug out of the past and screen shots slapped onto Twitter for the world to ridicule and judge, I went ahead and took the liberty to drag out some of the more notable changes that I’d witnessed about myself throughout the last ten years, and regardless of how wince-worthy and regrettable some of the things I’ve written may have been, the fact of the matter is that these are things that I’d thought, ways that my mind worked, and feelings that I felt at those specific instances, and I own the things I’ve said.
Because as much as some of the more regrettable things I’ve written might make me, much less anyone else, wince, cringe or face palm, I do think the revisionist history culture of 2020 is way worse.
Alternatively, this post probably should’ve just been titled “content that did not age well”
eSports: let’s start off with something not so heavy, but man, back in the day did I love to clown on the general idea of eSports, and the escalating notion that video game players were classified as professional athletes, same as guys like LeBron James, Brian Urlacher and Ken Griffey, Jr. By definition, the only real difference was the fact that video game players were often times dumpy Korean kids, versus physical specimens of sports-ball players, but all were paid tons of money to basically play children’s games at elite levels. I think inherently, there was a jealousy and resentment that I simply was born in the wrong era, where video games were considered nothing but brain rot, versus how they’ve grown into legitimate career paths, with sky-high salaries, and even colleges giving free rides to high-potential gamers.
So over the last decade, I went to clowning on eSports on a fairly regular basis, and then thanks to League of Legends and mythical now-wife, I got really hard into the professional scene, and not only did we go to live League events like the Inaugural Mid-Season Invitational, we went to the League of Legends World Championships. Twice.
Nowadays, I just mostly keep my mouth shut about the rise of eSports and accept that professional gaming really is a thing, and half-assedly observe it from afar, because I’m old and don’t have time to really pay the genre much attention these days.
Race issues: okay, let’s get straight to the meat of this post, and most of the impetus behind it in the first place. Obviously, I’ve been called a racist more than anyone should be ashamed to admit, but as I often say, as much attention I give towards the topic of racism, it’s not like I take those thoughts and influence myself to go burn crosses or discriminate against people of color as a result. That’s bigotry, and that’s something I’m definitely not okay with. Racist shit, sure whatever, but it’s not like it’s coming from a place with no basis; frankly, as also a minority but not black, I just feel American culture is a little way too overboard with their white guilt and PC tendency to walk eggshells around black culture, but there’s not even close the same courtesy when it comes to Asian people.
Granted, Asian people aren’t getting choked to death and murdered by the police and/or rednecks to the degree that 2020 has escalated the awareness button, but I also feel that Asians get treated like a third-tier of minority that not only gets tons of passive-aggressive shit from the white community, but are also targets from the black community, as if they’re taking our their frustration with being targets of racism, by being racist towards other races.
But that said, back in the day, I was pretty triggered when Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem, and when the phrase Black Lives Matter started to become a thing. I even played a little devil’s advocate for Donald Sterling when he was caught sending racist emails, citing the first amendment. Needless to say, some racial insensitivity from me should be about as surprising as finding out water is wet, but as I’ve stated, ten years is a long time, and my general lines of thinking aren’t necessarily the same as they were many years ago.
As time has passed, I’ve softened on Kaepernick’s actions, and have more understood the rationale behind it, although I maintain that now he kind of doesn’t actually want to return to football, in spite of the fact that the flagrant blacklisting of him has been lifted. Black Lives Matter annoyed me initially, because the terminology itself rubbed me the wrong way, but I’ve learned throughout the years that it stemming from the sheer perception that they’re not trying to matter more than anyone else, but they’re just trying to matter at all, as the perception of the community is oft-perceived as mattering in the negatives to begin with.
Needless to say, not that I imagine anyone but me is really diving into the archives with any regularity, but it’s important to me to acknowledge that I’ve said some not-so great things in the past, but to acknowledge that I’ve learned more in time, and the world has changed, and that I don’t harbor certain opinions and lines of thinking like I once did, and as far as mattering goes, I’m definitely in the camp that all lives can’t matter if the black ones don’t either.
Politics: full disclosure, I fucking hate politics. But I like to think it’s probably just one of those things that happens as people age and get older, but it goes without saying that I’ve definitely woken up more to politics over the last few years especially, given the state of the country, and all the shit that’s happened since especially the 2016 election. Despite the fact that my WordPress-era brog goes back to 2010, there is nary a mention of the 2012 election, because it frankly wasn’t important to me, but by 2016, things had definitely changed.
And it’s not even just the baked potato, since 2016, politics have permeated into my general thoughts all the way down to the local state level, and the last few times I’ve participated in votes, I’ve tried my best to take the time to gather intel on all candidates for all positions, because I’ve finally woken up to understand the importance of my vote.
Make no mistake, I still abhor and fucking hate politics, but at least I can have a more educated opinion of why I do, if ever queried.
I learned how to spell Chick Fil-A, eventually: looking back at a lot of old posts, I’m mortified at how often I spelled Chick Fil-A, “Chic Fil-A.” I mean, it’s not like I worked on CFA’s creative for almost an entire year at one of the agencies that I temped at, you’d think I’d have absorbed how to spell their name, especially given how often I still go there to this very day. Thankfully, I got my shit together and figured out how to spell it, after six god damn years.
NCAA student athletes getting paid: I used to be more adamant about my stance on student-athletes getting paid, and how it was greedy bullshit every time the topic came up on whether or not NCAA student-athletes should be getting any sort of monetary compensation.
I still do believe that it might not be monetary, but student-athletes are paid in room, board, tuition, and general food, but when it comes to the matter of schools profiting off of the likeness and identities of individual players, that’s where I’ve come more around that yeah, that’s not really quite fair, especially as the years have revealed, the NCAA itself, as well as all of the schools, are making massive amounts of money on the efforts of said student-athletes.
Some degree of kickback should be warranted, although I maintain that it should be held in trusts or some sort of escrow to where it’s unavailable to the athletes until they’re actually no longer students, but it’s a start to changing my line of thinking in this regard.
Clowning on Atlanta United: look, living in Atlanta, we’re used to failure from our sports teams. That’s just what Atlanta teams do. So when Atlanta United showed up in 2018, promptly made the playoffs, and promptly did what all their other professional brethren does and choke, why should I have thought anything would’ve been different in 2019? Well, call it murphy’s law, or I can take all the credit in the world for creating the reverse-jinx, but Atlanta United had to go and make me look the fool when they had to go win the MLS Cup immediately the following year.
Spoiler, I’m not disappointed at all; I’m happy the “curse” has been lifted, and maybe other Atlanta sports teams can stop caving into the pressure if and when the world ever gets back to allowing for professional sports.
Contracts aren’t bad if you win a championship AKA the 2019 Washington Nationals: baseball geeks love to talk about player contracts as if their money actually has an impact on their personal lives. But basically, geeks love to bemoan and instantly declare any and all baseball contracts as “bad,” solely because they’re for egregiously high dollar amounts. Honestly, I’m not that much different from the rest of those geeks, and back in 2016, when the Nationals basically dumped a gozillion dollars to retain both pitchers Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer, I thought “LOL how dumb, waste of money,” and all sorts of geeky rhetoric.
As time passed, and my perspective on sports mutated, ultimately, I learned to reserve judgment until the contracts are closer to expiring, because when the day is over, a contract really can’t be considered bad, if championship(s) were achieved, and in the case of the Nationals, they did just that in 2019, when they improbably refused to die, and climbed to the top of the mountain and won the World Series.
So no matter the fact that the Nationals will still be paying nobody $27M in 2024, frankly nobody in Washington will really care, since they can always look back to the 2019 World Series to remember that it was worth it.
And speaking of the 2019 Nationals: the team they beat to win the World Series, the Houston Astros, were making their second World Series appearance and I think fourth playoff appearance in the last 4-5 years, having won the championship back in 2017. I was very pleased with the 2017 win, as they fulfilled a season-long prediction I made about how I thought they were the team of destiny, and all sports fans love to be right.
Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the fans is that the Astros basically cheated throughout most of this renaissance period, having developed an intricate sign-stealing system while playing at home, that involved a live-feed camera, codebreakers in the locker room, and a rudimentary process of banging on trash cans to signal to the batter at what might be coming.
Although it’s hardly the most outlandish form of cheating in the history of the game, it was still a little underhanded, and tarnished the notion that the Astros were solely destiny fulfillers, and instead just some sneaky competitors who weren’t above using a little bit of underhanded tactics, but for lack of a better term, the world has just agreed to call them cheaters.
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Honestly, I thought there would be more things that I had some fairly drastic changes of heart on over the last ten years. I had this post in mind pretty early on in my trip down memory lane, but let’s be real here, the only one really worth discussing is the topic of race, because race is always a hot button topic, and I’m sure anyone reading my drivel would love to point the finger at me and call me a racist.
But the most important thing is that I acknowledge the fact that in my lifetime, I’ve stated some questionable or flat-out wrong things before, but I also want to make clear that things do change, whether it be in my life, circumstances, or as a result of the world simply changing around us all, that opinions don’t always last forever, and many thoughts, are capable of change, and hopefully for the positive.
