Tag: nostalgia

When kids make grown-up money #2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have a hard time answering whenever anyone asks what I want for my birthday/Christmas.  For those people whom I do exchange gifts with, I imagine it’s extremely aggravating having to shop for me; shit I aggravate the piss out of myself whenever I want to do my own recreational for-me shopping, so I know this is fact.

So back in April, when my sister asked what I wanted for my birthday, I actually had an answer for her: I wanted a Tyrannosaurus Rex Dinozord that I’d seen existed.

I am nearly a 40-year old man, and I wanted a toy back from my grade school days.  Like when I got my DragonZord figure a few years back, and ultimately my MegaZord a few years after that.

Anyway, the issue with this is that the price of this particular toy remake is that the price has a tendency to fluctuate, as it seems to be available in only places that are not the United States as if America needed any more reasons why I’m beginning to think we suck on a daily basis.  During the holidays, I’d seen it dip down into the $50s, but at around April, $100 was the typical going rate.  I implored my sister to keep watch and she basically told me to keep watch and let her know if the price dipped to something more reasonable.

Long story short, it dipped down to $65, and my sister pulled the trigger on it.  However, this also coincided with the biggest spike of coronavirus across the fucking planet and the seller was in Japan and explained that JapanPost was no longer sending to the US for the time being, so that the shipping would be on hold indefinitely.  But as I am nearly a 40-year old man with no rush on when this toy should arrive, I told my sister to hold out and wait it out.

That was back in April.  Needless to say, after like July it seemed pretty obvious what was happening; the seller was making shit up to get my sister to refund and cancel the order, so that the guy could relist the toy back up to $110, where it seems to have spiked back up.  If it were up to me, I’d have held true and maybe gotten Amazon involved to see if they could strongarm the dick in Japan to pony up, but my sister is not me, and she instead just got the refund and gave me a $65 gift card.

Slightly dejected at not getting my tyrannosaurus Dinozord, I went on eBay to see if I could test my luck.  And lo and behold, I found some figurine collector in France who was selling the same toy, brand new, for $50~.  And to sweeten the pot, I had just gotten an email from eBay to congratulate me on being an OG member back from 1999, and they gave me a $25 coupon code, so now I was in a position where I couldn’t not buy this thing.

Anyway, my T-Rex dinozord arrived today, and I’m quite pleased.  It’s amazing the lengths and money I expend in order to acquire things that ultimately just end up sitting dormant on shelves or walls, but damn it, they make me happy.

But the best part about this new toy, was the evident ability to compare it to the old toy.

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Things that have happened since the brog’s been down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shortly after my brog went down in April 2016, I started a document, bulleting things that want to potentially write about, in the event that the site would be back up within like a month or two.  Obviously that never happened, but it didn’t really stop me from adding to the list on a regular basis, even if it continued for nearly four years.

At first, it was a pretty nitty-gritty list, straight to the point and pretty succinct at what I wanted to remember.  But by the time 2018 rolled around, I noticed some patterns and categories in which things caught my attention and warranted notation, and so some categories started to take place.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to share all of this, but for whatever reason I’m following through with it, and basically this is going to be little more than a massive bulleted list of things that happened between mid-2016 through mid-2020, with probably not a lot of context, but likely some snark and veiled commentary peppered throughout.

2016

  • Pokemon Go came, lit the world on fire for 15 minutes, and then flamed out harder than the FOX Fantastic Four films
  • I became The Burrito King of Atlanta, winning Willy’s Road Trip promotion by visiting 27 Willy’s locations in four days
  • Kobe Bryant retired from professional basketball, but not before dropping 60 in his final game
  • The Golden State Warriors won 73 games and passed the ’96 Bulls’ unbreakable record, but then lost in the NBA finals like chumps
  • The Atlanta Braves retired Turner Field for whiter pastures, by sucking hardcore and losing 93 games
  • Hulk Hogan killed Gawker
  • Went on a European cruise vacation with mythical then-gf, visiting Italy, Turkey, Croatia and Greece
  • Went to Korea for the first time in my life, with my mom
  • The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking a 108-year long drought and endless memes
  • An orange baked potato reality television personality inexplicably won the presidency of the United States of America
  • A fuckton of people died from senseless gun violence

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How things can change over the span of a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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”

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It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy: Matt Altmix

As excited as I am to have my brog back up and running, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how absolutely none of this happens if not for my brother.  For pretty much as long as I’ve known him, he’s been the rock in which my internet presence has always existed upon, and he’s literally hosted almost every iteration of my site(s) going on three decades now.

Back in like 2000, before my original webhost expired, he volunteered to host a mirror of my original site.  Eventually the subscription lapsed, and then the mirror became the primary.  As a joke, he purchased the domain needelsischeating.net to also point to my site, but then because I was poor and stupid, I let my domain lapse, get cybersquatted by eBay, and then needelsischeating.net became my primary domain.  Eventually, I would register totfc.net, which for those of you who don’t know, stands for TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN because when it comes to actual blogging, I firmly believe that is what I am, and it would become the domain I’ve had since, and my brother hosted it the entire time, all the way from when it was a catch-all site for a lot of all my internet bullshit, to when in 2010, I switched it to a WordPress, because I realized that the brogging was really the only thing I actually cared about.

It was a sad few years when the brog went down, because life gets in the way, and he had moved from North Carolina to Louisiana and then finally to Bratislava, and naturally, servers need to physically move as well.  And he had things going on in his life, as I had things going on in mine, as does everyone, so getting the site back up definitely sat on the back burner for all of us.

But with my daughter on the way and eventually having arrived, I always felt that I wanted to have my brog back up, because one, it was a logical and desired project for me to work on while I was out on paternity leave, but two, given the fact that I’ve definitely got plenty to say about being a new dad, and raising a baby in the midst of a pandemic, I really wanted to have an outlet in which I could actually share my thoughts, emotions and experiences to anyone who might want to stumble across and find my blatherings one day, if not my daughter herself, hopefully when she’s like 23, grown-up and capable of understanding and comprehending the words I’ve slapped onto the internet.  I mean, I’ve been brogging for 20 years now, who’s to say I won’t be doing it when she’s that old?

And as he always does, my brother came through, and took the time to dust off all my old shit, put it back up online, and put me into a position to where I could resurrect the brog.  I could’ve just picked back up from where I last left off, but I figured now was as good of time as any to try and at least remain somewhat in the present in terms of platform, and almost all of my free time over the last three months have been spent working away at this task, which brings us back to today.

I love him more than Floridians love Publix chicken tender subs, Philadelphians love Wawa, and more than he loves Bojangles.  And I want him, and all of my zero readers to know that, that I treasure his brotherhood, friendship and companionship, and that I thank him every single day for being the brother I never had, and hosting my decades of internet nonsense that really doesn’t mean anything to anyone except for me.

Chalk this up under whyyyy????

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For some reason, The Karate Kid is being adapted into a Broadway musical.  I have to ask again: whyyyyy????

The obvious answer is probably that Robert Mark Kamen, the original screenwriter, probably needs the money.  The fact that it’s been 36 years since 1984, and it’s hard to imagine anyone living forever on the royalties of just one series; and with the recent successes of the Cobra Kai spin-off, it’s probably been no better time than the present to sell out the rights to go Broadway.

But still, my knee-jerk reaction to the news that one of the most iconic films of the 80s, is just now headed for Broadway, for a musical rendition.  Sure, the story is simple and linear enough to turn into a musical, but it just seems like a hokey sellout to imagine particular scenes in the film being danced and theatrically performed instead of the gritty, Ralph Macchio-has-no-real-talent versus a legitimately-can-fight-William-Zabka, like on the beach, or at the finals of the All-Valley Under-18 Karate Tournament.

The eventual training montage, which are basically musicals in their own right, will be replaced by a more over-the-top dance rendition of whatever schlub they get to play Daniel, dancing around, occasionally flailing his legs in whatever they’re going to consider kicks, and I’m going to cringe at just the thought, because I highly doubt that there’s a chance that I’ll actually see it; I don’t have any objection to Broadway or theatre in general, but I do bristle at the idea of the properties of my childhood all one-by-one being exploited and re-imagined in wildly conflicting mediums.

But more importantly, don’t get me started on whatever inevitably-will-be-racist guy they get to play Mr. Miyagi.  The true heart and soul of the entire series, whether it’s a Japanese guy that’s probably not old enough to portray the character, but is cast anyway because of his ability to dance and move, or whether they whitewash the role and give it to like fucking Henry Golding, it’s a no-win situation waiting to happen when they cast Mr. Miyagi, and it’s going to make me nauseated at the idea of some wildly inappropriate looking motherfucker playing what should be the late great Pat Morita.

Long story short, this doesn’t need to exist.  But because nothing is allowed to stay in the past, or isn’t sold to the nostalgia bastardization machine, here we are.  I question why this even needed to become a thing, but honestly, I can’t say that I’m the least bit surprised that it is, unfortunately.

It couldn’t have happened anywhere else

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: 28-year old man stabbed to death over Popeyes’ chicken sandwich in Oxon Hill, Maryland

Honestly, I’m more surprised it’s taken this long for there to be any killings over Popeyes’ chicken sandwich (that I haven’t been able to try but am highly skeptical that it has any possibility of living up to the hype much less being superior to Chick Fil-A or Bojangles).  Maybe there have been, but considering that nothing’s made the news like this one, I’m led to believe that this is the first.

But there we have it: a person was killed over the artificial mania created over a fucking chicken sandwich.

If this really was the first incident of someone dying over the craze over the Popeyes chicken sandwich, I have to say that it really couldn’t have first happened anywhere else than Oxon Hill, Maryland.  I’m actually quite familiar with Oxon Hill, and it’s not just me flinging shit and generalizing because I have an innate disdain for the state of Maryland; seeing as how my parents’ old barbecue restaurant was in Oxon Hill for seven years, and how I worked there for the last two, is specifically why I’m familiar with Oxon Hill and had developed such a disdain for the state of Maryland.

In fact, my parents’ old restaurant was literally two doors down the strip plaza from this specific Popeyes’ where a guy was stabbed to death over a chicken sandwich.  One my biggest pet peeves I had when I worked there was when people would get their meals at Popeyes and bring them into my parents’ restaurant and bought a small drink from us so they could justify sitting in our tiny dining area to eat because our business was so poor the last few years.

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The snakeheads have invaded Georgia!

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back in the early 2000s, when I was still living up in Northern Virginia, there was an ecological incident that in all honesty, is still affecting the western hemisphere to this very day.  North America was introduced to the snakehead fish, when some idiot in Maryland or New York decided to release the non-native invasive species into a pond in Maryland.

As they have no natural predators and are omnivorous, they decimated the pond, but it’s their other ability that puts their name on the map, namely the part where they can get out of water and can survive on land for extended periods of time, effectively long enough for them to find other bodies of water, and new environments to dominate.

Despite the best efforts of professional environmentalists, the threat of snakehead fish has never been able to be truly contained, and much like the plot of a horror story, their numbers have grown and the regions in which they’ve been spotted has only grown.  Supposedly, they’ve been seen as far south as Florida, and even spotted in parts of the Mississippi River, among other places, far from their original release point in Maryland.

Well, as of yesterday, they’ve never been reported in Georgia until now.  At least four were caught in a private pond in Gwinnett county, and frankly, it’s probably already too late.  If this is anything like the original incident in Maryland, by the time they’re discovered, they’ve probably already reproduced and they’re already engrained in the ecosystem, that they’ll slowly dominate and take over until they start flopping out onto land and mosey on to other bodies of water that they can then dominate further.

Regardless of the bad news this means for the environments in which they appear, snakehead fish do fascinate me.  I remember being engrossed in all the news back in 2002 about this incredible apex predator of a fish that had no predators and ate everything in sight.  I kind of respected their power, and felt like I needed to catch and eat a snakehead fish myself, to assert my dominance over the species on the global food chain. 

Seeing as how they’ve now made it into Georgia, these feelings are kind of rekindled, and I wish that I had the gear and the know-how to go find them, fish for them, catch one and then eat it, so that I can usurp its powers into myself, and maybe it’ll give me some power.