Tag: observations

Love him or hate him, Tom Brady is a winner

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that I’ve been paying that much attention to the NFL this season other than the ironically entertaining aspects of a season that I maintain probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place; if it were up to me, the upcoming Superb Owl would be the Washington Redskins Football Team versus the Buffalo Bills, so that we could have a repeat of 1991, but a team with an idiotic interim name and a 7-9 record would, give the Buffalo Bills a loss in the Superb Owl, for old times’ sake, and the season would end in an ironic combination of some things change, some things stay the same.

Instead, we have the heavily favored Chiefs, which in itself is a little difficult to comprehend, because for the longest time the Chefs (yes the Chefs) were that one team that always made it to the playoffs, but would always get bounced in the second round, usually losing to like the Steelers or Broncos, and nobody would ever really take them seriously as legitimate contenders, especially since Andy Reid took over, and that guys manages timeouts like he manages cheeseburgers, which is to say he devours them all, and then there’s nothing left at the end.

And opposing the Chefs, is a team that hasn’t sniffed a championship since 2002, but at the very helm of it is a guy that has sniffed more than his share of Lombardi trophies in his time, in none other than Tom. Period. Brady. Period.

Just about anyone with a sports pulse knew of the general story of how Tom Brady left the New England Patriots, and instead of retirement, he just kind of inexplicably signs with, of all the teams in the NFL, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  A team that had gone 59-101 over the last decade, and was coming off of three straight losing seasons, with two of them placing last in the pitiful NFC South division.

For a guy that literally had nothing left to prove, as he already has six Superb Owl championships, an underwear model wife, and lord knows how much money earned in his career, another season for a cellar-dweller like the Bucs seemed like a really sad way to end his career, and likely injured on the way out as a shit team usually can’t protect their QB.

But I guess Brady really wanted to prove that he could win without Bill Belichick, and put to rest permanently the answer to the question of who really was the talent behind the Patriots’ success throughout the last 20 years, and seeing as how one has reached the Superb Owl, while the other didn’t even make the playoffs, I guess the answer is pretty abundantly clear now, but it really shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Love him or hate him, Tom Brady truly is the GOAT of football.  It doesn’t even matter if the Bucs win the Superb Owl or not, although me personally I can’t say that I kind of would be rooting for Brady, despite the fact that I’m most definitely no fan of the Bucs, but I’ve never really had any issue with Brady, and I respect the greatness.  But he’s already proven his point and one that really was inconsequential in the grand spectrum of things but was clearly still very important to him to stamp his claim over Belichick as the real reason for the Patriots’ success.

But really, I just kind of sadistically enjoy how everyone fucking hates Tom Brady so much, but it’s like he feeds off the hate and burning rage that his existence incites within haters, and it only makes him that much more effective.  Patrick Mahomes is a legend in his own right, being someone who was capable of lifting the once-hapless Chefs into becoming the respectable defending champion Chiefs, but in two weeks’ time, he’ll be going up against the literal god of professional football, and he’ll be back to square one at having his own thing to prove.

In the end, I don’t really care who wins, because the NFL is kind of a sad sack of an organization, and I resent just how much pull and influence it has on the entire, well country.  Which is why I’d like to see Tom Brady hoist up yet another Superb Owl Lombardi, because it’s the closest thing to a giant middle finger to all the haters there possibly could be.

Can people on the internet just shut the fuck up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know it’s a rhetorical question with the answer being a very obvious NO, but still, I really really really wish people could just shut the fuck up all the time sometimes.

One of the things that I thought was refreshing about WandaVision was the fact that I was completely blind going into it.  I had no earthly idea on what was going to happen, how it came to be, the general players of the series, and most importantly, zero idea to what the source material(s) was going to be.

As much as I enjoyed large swaths of the MCU Phase 1, everyone knew what the source material was, and everyone basically knew how it was going to end.  Most everyone who read comic books at all during the 90s knew what The Infinity Saga was, and it was always widely available in trade paperbacks, or people could just look on Wikipedia to get straight to the point of how it all played out.  Although MCU took tons of liberties on how things transpired, there was a very basic and inevitable conclusion to the journey, and it was pretty much as expected through and through.

After a little bit of a hiatus, restructuring and Didney engulfing even more properties and licenses, the next phase has been launched, primarily with the Disney+ deployment, and the early installment of the series starts with WandaVision.

It’s weird, I have no idea what’s really going on, but there are hints and glimpses of things to come which all seems pretty interesting.  But I’m also loving the general creativity of the visuals, the entertaining journey through time, and just how everything is so crisply presented.

One thing I noticed early on was that despite the supposed 35-minute run times of each episode, around 7-8 minutes of it is dedicated to the credits; it was pointed out to me that the filming of the show, as well as all other future TV series, were basically filmed like movies, but then broken up into episodes, so it seems apparent that each episode seems to be running the full ending credits for what amounts to a film; it’s kind of annoying, and deceptive to the run time, but after realizing that there’s no mid or post credits scenes, I haven’t bothered sitting through them again.

But that was clearly just me; because I try to practice what I preach, I won’t get into the granular details of what’s already been revealed to me because people on the internet can’t shut the fuck up, and are even worse at blurting out spoiler-y clickbait headlines, but I was scrolling through theFacebook, I noticed this headline about how some particular words used in the lengthy credits for WandaVision give some pretty predominant hints on what is to come, plot-wise, and because of the aforementioned inability to shut the fuck up, they basically go on to name it in the subtext, visible in plain sight, plain as day.

So great, now that I’ve seen that, things kind of make a little more sense, and I can kind of see the wireframes of how the show is going to get to such a narrative.

Because a bunch of nerds have to know what the source material or end game of the series is, they have to ruin it for people like me, who simply want to enjoy the ride, not think too fucking hard about things, and accept things as they’re presented to me.

It’s times like this I loathe the internet and social media especially, but because I don’t want to be an island of a person again, it’s not something that I can just walk away from cold turkey.  But god damn does it infuriate me from time to time, and it’s sad that the world is so dependent on it that we can’t seem to operate without.

Is it even an upset anymore?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because of coronavirus and/or the fact that I’m a dad with little time to indulge in sports as much as I used to/like to, a lot of sports news tends to go over my head these days.  I still think that it’s a bad idea for any sport to be happening in a country that can’t get their shit together to prevent the spread of coronavirus, but here we are, and pretty much every sport is going on business as usual, with that phrase being used as succinctly as possible, because they’re not really so much sports as much as they are businesses with the expectation to make a bunch of rich people even richer.

Anyway, the point of this post is the fact that Duke went to Blacksburg almost two weeks ago and lost, again.  For those keeping count, this is the fourth time out of Duke’s last five trips to Blacksburg that they’ve lost to Virginia Tech, and at this point, we really need to ask, is it even an upset anymore?  I mean I know I haven’t been paying much attention to sports in general as it is, but I still try to keep an ear to the ground, to at least interesting happenings, upsets or general news in the world of sports.

Duke is currently sitting at 5-5 with a 3-3 conference record, which makes them plain mediocre overall, and it doesn’t really make any news until Coach K blows up at a student reporter and that’s where I even learned that Duke had lost three in a row, which for as much as I dislike the program, is pretty unprecedented.  It’s what prompted me to check to see how they fared against Virginia Tech, since I knew they were on the schedule, and I was a little surprised to see that not only was it not a part of the three consecutive losses, but it was nearly two weeks ago and I didn’t hear a peep about it.

So the takeaways of this post are the obvious fact that Duke sucks; but actually sucks this year, in the sense that they’re nowhere near the top of the ACC as they typically are.  And the fact that for whatever reason, they have a real hard time of winning in Blacksburg and beating Virginia Tech; in basketball, their B-sport, although there are probably tons of jokes about that notion over the last few years, but I think the point is made.

Granted, this is akin to the jinx that the next time Duke rolls into Blacksburg, they’ll probably have 3-4 of the top-10 recruits in the nation ready to do their one-and-done seasons, and because I’ve gotten smarmy enough to make a post like this, they’ll probably blow the Hokies out by like 24 points.  Whatever though, it’s a fine time to be a Hokie as far as Duke basketball is concerned right now.

Don’t know what to do with free time when I have it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I could’ve written this last night.  Or the night before.  But instead, I’m writing it now, under the challenge of wanting to knock out something before I have to go wake up my child from the first nap of the day, because I’m feeling like I haven’t really accomplished anything productive over the weekends that I pine for during the week, but have no idea what to do when they finally arrive.

So I close my work laptop on Friday afternoon, and spend the rest of the afternoon playing with my daughter until it’s time for her to go to bed.  Bath time, and then bed time, and after she’s asleep, I finally have some free time for myself for a few hours, before I go to bed at a conservative hour because I’m up at 6:30 am every single day and I don’t want to bone myself just because I want to stay up late just because it’s the weekend.

I don’t really do anything at all.  I sit at my laptop watching random YouTube clips of chiropractor cracking, Initial D, and the seemingly endless parade of rehashed Parks & Recreation clips.  Actually, I take that back partially, I watched the first two episodes of WandaVision, which I think it’s too early to tell how I feel about it, except that I’m able to stay in the game with it unlike Legion, but both episodes combined were about 45 minutes once you factor in the 14 minutes of ending credits in the first two episodes.

Before I know it, it’s 11:07 pm, it’s too late for me to watch anything else, but it’s still a hair earlier than I’d rather go to bed, so instead I lay in bed playing Fire Emblem Heroes or doing surveys for pennies on my phone until it’s time to go to bed.

Saturday was a pretty good day, as I like to tie in little excursions amidst caring for my child throughout the day and in between her naps, so that we can all feel like we’re actually leaving our house, even if it the vast majority of places are contactless or curbside pickups.  We tried a new restaurant, ran some errands with no complications, and I heard from a friend that had been on my mind lately.  I felt in such good spirits, I felt as if I should capitalize and buy a lottery ticket, since the Powerball was up to $640M, and why the fuck not.

Baby goes to bed, and then it’s really more of the same – I don’t really know what to do, so I end up sitting at my laptop dicking around, feeling like I should at least watch something, hemming and hawing for way longer than most people typically do, and then watching the last two episodes of Lovecraft Country that I hadn’t seen, except my heart’s not really into it, and I ultimately end up thinking it’s just kind of okay.  Now it’s 11 pm, and I’m thinking of retiring so I don’t kill myself at 6:30 the next morning.

Which brings us to today.  Instead of the one nap I give myself while baby naps (that was done on Saturday), I go ahead and get my every-other-day run out of the way.  I pre-prepare a recipe that mythical wife and I hope will be baby-friendly, and now I’m sitting here thinking that I’ve let a large portion of the weekend go to waste, and musing at the simple fact that I don’t really know what to do with my free time whenever I do have any.  I could watch television or movies and chip into the queues that have bloated to gargantuan proportions, but then I often times get choice paralysis and then end up shutting down from overstimulation, and instead wishing that there were just more 90 Day Fiance or My 600 Lb. Life to watch instead, which are the only shows that I really truly stay up on top of.

But that’s where I’m at now.  I just don’t really know what to do with my free time, and that alone is enough to make me anxious and wordy but not do anything about it.  It just becomes a topic for me to mindlessly brog about to consume 25 minutes in a manner that doesn’t feel like completely a waste.  Then soon will be time to wake up my child, and proceed with her day, and if she’s fussy or cranky, then I’m guiltily counting down the clock until the next nap to when I can have some free time that I don’t know what to do with, and then the cycle continues until it’s time to go to bed and then a larger cycle continues.

It sounds way more depressing than I actually feel, but when I try to look at things objectively, that’s really how it kind of looks.  But at least I hit the Powerball three times, so I’ll get back a whopping $12 on my $20 investment.

An observation about the Final Fantasy VII remake

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think I’ve made any secret that I think that Final Fantasy VII is probably one of the most overrated games in the history of the industry.  Personally, VI is still my favorite among all that I’ve played, followed closely by IV.  But all pale in comparison to Final Fantasy Tactics. 

Regardless, just because I thought it was overrated didn’t mean that I didn’t play it; of course I played it.  Did all the stuff that all players back in 1997 did, breed chocobos so you could get a golden one, which was the only way to get the Knights of the Round materia which basically put the rest of the game on easy mode thereafter.  I beat Emerald Weapon, but was never able to beat Ruby, but by then my interest had already waned and I didn’t feel any real need to bother and try. 

Needless to say, the game didn’t really leave a long lasting impression on me personally, and I was always fascinated to why so many people thought this was the pinnacle of video games, and continued to do so for literal decades afterward.

So imagine my general ambivalence-resentment at the nearly decade-long song and dance of a FFVII remake being developed and released, that ultimately dropped over the last year, to which I was disgusted to find out that even that was still just a portion of the game, which people basically had to pay a full price for a part of a game, and a remake at that.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to shit on everyone’s parade who was ecstatic for more FFVII, but I was pretty irritated at the general low-ambition business model of remaking an old game instead of trying to develop and tell new stories.

Recently, I’ve been getting video suggestions for FFVII remake videos on YouTube and because I’m now a parent with low tolerance for searching and wanting to instead be presented, I’ve watched several over the last few days, because I was seeing things and/or characters that I didn’t recognize from the original version, plus watching gameplay videos satiates any curiosity I might have about the way the game plays or looks without having to commit the money or the time investment into finding out personally.

Clearly, because the objective of the remake is to drag things out as long as possible so they can sell individual chapters of the game at full MSRPs over a window of time, the remake has definitely taken some liberties to flesh things out tremendously, and give a lot more spotlight to characters that were definitely more tertiary in the original than they are now.

But in the process of fleshing things out more thoroughly, I’ve noticed that the game has taken the time to really inject some more personality and character into the individual core characters as well, and 23 years of technological advancement has given the visuals the ability to interpret stuff like facial expression and body language to do all the talking that the dialogue might not have been able to do itself in 1997.

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I am basically the Oakland A’s

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to attempt to do an exercise of writing something that gets to the point in a short window of time before it’s time to wake up my child from her nap.

Despite the fact that I am always perpetually tired from chasing around an infant child as well as balancing working from home for demanding tyrants who lack a lot of basic human traits, you’d think the weekend would be the perfect time to steal and extra 60-90 minutes of extra sleep once I put my daughter down for the first nap of the day. 

Most of the time, I do, but then there are days like today in which I think that I could be so much more productive in this 90-110 minute window in which my child is sleeping and I don’t have to be working, so I forego the nap, and I do one of numerous things that I know that I’ll have to do at some point in the day, but with the mentality of getting it done now so I don’t have to worry about it later, so that I can relax and enjoy my free time once my child is down for the night.

Like for example, today, I decided to go for my every-other-day treadmill jog session, which is basically the furthest opposite from a nap there could possibly be, but among the few things that I am completely staunchly opposed to deviating from, it’s my every-other-day jogs, because I need to do them in order to maintain a modicum of physical well-being seeing as how I haven’t been to a gym since like March 10, 2020.

I finish my jog, and I’m thinking, hey, I could probably still steal like an hour or so of a nap before my daughter is up, but then my mind is racing, and I’m thinking of other things to do instead to make better use of the time, and promising to myself that tomorrow will be the extra sleep day.  So I do a few chores, make a grocery list, and plan out things that will make later possibly easier, at the cost of now, and I realize that this is often times a self-repeating cycle of foregoing the present for the sake of the future, but often times losing sake of the present because when the future comes it’ll be the present and then everything repeats all over again and I never actually relax or wind down.

I’m basically the Oakland A’s of . . . well, I’m basically the Oakland A’s.  A baseball organization that so often times gets fixated on the potential of the future, that they’re always sacrificing the present and seemingly losing sight of the things in front of them, in their present possession. But then the future arrives, and they’re still in this mindset that they’re still not ready to go for it, so they do more tinkering, more trading, more holding over, and then they never actually contend beyond these stop-gap seasons of marginal success and have never threatened true World Series contention.

I know that this is an inherent flaw in how I operate, but at the same time I think I take great enjoyment when I’m being efficient with my time, even if it’s coming at the cost of resting my body and mind.  I guess I don’t hold as much priority into well-being, or at least I seem to think that the rewards of high efficiency and time management outweigh the rewards of resting.  But I know that our bodies are machines that do need the occasional rest, and if I don’t figure out how to break the cycle of being the Oakland A’s every now and then and actually capitalize on my opportunities to gain some rest, then it could be detrimental to my general well-being.

Am I done?  Did I get to the point?  It appears so.  Very verbose me, keeping it short(ish) and with no mention of recent political bullshit.  Hooray me!

The Mandalorian Season 2 Thoughts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife and I just caught up with The Mandalorian’s second season, which is kind of miraculous in its own right, as we’re both on new parent schedules plus we don’t want to introduce our child to screens, so our general television consumption is probably a tenth of what most of our friends and family tend to watch.  The fact that we’re only a week removed from the finale is a miracle, since there’s a litany of shows and movies that we’ve stated interest in wanting to watch but the realism is that it’ll be eons before we do, if we even remember to watch them in the first place.

However, a week removed wasn’t nearly enough time for the shitheads of the internet to spoil a ton of shit for us in advance of our opportunity to watch the show.  Between all of the excitable fuckwits on social media who couldn’t shut the fuck up even if it there were guns held to their family’s heads, and now actual sci-fi/pop culture sites themselves just outright blow covers and spoilers under the guise that there’s some appropriate official statute of limitation when it comes to being allowed to talk about shit, it’s been impossible for mythical wife and myself to not get spoiled to varying capacities.

Mythical wife apparently got it worse than I did, because of her choice of people she connects with, but even a relative shut-in like me was still spoiled to some degree when someone posted a gif of X doing Y, revealing a pretty substantial moment of the show (was that so fucking difficult, no), so we agreed that before it could get any worse, we needed to buckle down and watch the show before I declared jihad on everyone I know for when they would inevitably spoil more shit for me.

Yes, it sounds like I’m making my problems the problems of others, but at the same time, do people really lack the common sense to just shut the fuck up about things for just a little while?  Yes, the answer is always yes.

Regardless of quality of acting, plot, and other superlatives, one of the greatest things about The Mandalorian in general, is that they’re fairly quick and short episodes, and it’s a very easy show to stay on top of, provided the effort is put forth to actually start watching it.

And just like that, I’ve conveniently blathered on long enough to create a meaty post that hasn’t actually gotten to the point, and now I can comfortably tuck anything else that might be considered spoiler-ey behind a cut.

Continue reading “The Mandalorian Season 2 Thoughts” →