Tag: observations

NBA: National Bitches Association

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Prior to reading this, I implore my six readers to press play and listen to the theme of when the NBA was truly golden, and basketball was a respectable sport rife with athletes playing against other athletes in the game of basketball, and news was limited to solely basketball-related stories.

This is a topic that’s been on my head for quite some time, but never really chose to run with it, because quite frankly the world is full of way more interesting stories, or things that I’d rather write about, like overturned tractor trailers, or conspiracy theories about MARTA.  But then I saw this article about Ray Allen being a bitch because all his former Celtics teammates had a championship team reunion and didn’t invite him, because they are all bitches as well.

This story follows a week that also saw DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors whining about how his team would have advanced in the playoffs if they had LeBron James; like a sore loser, or, like a bitch. 

And speaking of LeBron James, earlier in the season, he had an altercation with a teammate, but instead of going Old Testament on him and kicking his ass in the locker room or throwing him under the bus to the media, instead he, the guy who brought glory back to Cleveland, won numerous championships and has nothing left to prove, assumes blame, takes responsibility for the altercation and apologizes to the jobber teammate, the fans and the organization.

Like a bitch.

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I did nothing but pretty much watch television all weekend

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And it was everything I thought it could be.  No really, for the vast majority of my weekend, I watched television primarily, and for the first time in a while feel like I actually had a nice relaxing weekend.

Prior to this past weekend, I’ve had to go into work at least once per, in four out of the last five weekends, and was just coming off a stretch where I’d gone into the office twelve straight days.  Working overtime for the betterment of the team, keeping shit on schedule and because the season occasionally dictates it isn’t really that big of a problem, but the sheer volume of my work compounded by a faulty machine that failed more frequently than a Volkswagen was putting me into a situation of rapid burnout, and this past weekend wasn’t so much of a deserved weekend off, it was absolutely necessary.

Needless to say, I slept in both days, which relatively speaking, means I slept like eight hours, instead of like six.  Granted, my body is so accustomed to waking up at like 6:30 a.m., I hit points where I always wake up between 6:30 and 7:30, panic about having overslept before realizing that it’s the weekend and then crawl back into bed with tremendous relief and try to go back to sleep and hope the animals didn’t hear any commotion and start trying to wake me up.

And when you’re feeling rested and caught up on sleep, everything afterward feels leisurely and relaxed.  Coffee tastes better.  Going to the gym for a run felt pleasant and not like a nuisance chore.  Taking the dogs out is more leisurely without a clock over your head on when it’s time to head to work.  Going out to hang with friends is more enjoyable when you know that there’s no drop dead cutoff time to get back home and get to sleep in order to get enough rest.

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Black Mirror is the best show I’ve seen in a while

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I just finished watching all episodes of Black Mirror on Netflix.  It still seems weird to say it, but I think it’s the best television series I’ve watched in a long time, because it’s one of those series that this opinion didn’t really formulate until I had some time to think about and process the episodes, and then I realize that I’m spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about the show and coming to a slower realization that it really a god damn good show.

I think the best way to describe the show, other than the fact that every episode is pretty self-contained and nobody has to watch them in any particular order, but the stories told, the concepts used, and the twists in the plot, they stick with you.  Seriously, the last time a show stuck with me so hard was Parks & Rec, which is a hilarious comparison to make, given the fact that Black Mirror is pretty much the polar opposite of Parks & Rec in almost every conceivable way.  Yet I favor both shows tremendously, in spite of their dramatically differing places on the spectrum.

Black Mirror should come with a trigger warning however, because they certainly seem to hit notes on a regular basis that, at least for me, that manages to trigger a fear, anxiety or line of thinking that is part revelation, part discovery, and part oh shit.  Regardless of that, I think that’s what makes the show such a unique program, in the fact that they so regularly manage to accomplish those kinds of emotional responses, which I think is ultimately what show creators should aspire to be getting.

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I liked Iron Fist.  Sue me.

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the first time in a while, I had a weekend where I had really nothing planned at all, so I made the best of it by pretty much doing absolutely nothing at all.  Meaning, I took the opportunity to sit around and watch a bunch of television and movies that I’d been putting off for a while.

I’ve made it pretty clear that I’ve been pretty fond of Netflix’s Marvel catalogue, and throughout the last year, I’ve watched and enjoyed both seasons of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage.  The objective for the choices of properties are obviously setting up an eventual run for The Defenders, but in order to get all the players onto the field, it was also obvious that Netflix would have to create and release a series about Iron Fist.

There was one obstacle that everyone including myself was a little dubious about the latter needing a series to be made about, and that’s simply the fact that among the Marvel Comics roster of characters, Iron Fist is pretty much a fucking lame property.

Such isn’t solely my own opinion, it’s often a very broadly accepted one.  Numerous writers have tried to varying degrees of failure, but the bottom line is that Iron Fist is a really, really weak property for Marvel Comics.  Almost completely incapable of carrying a series, about himself, Iron Fist found the most success when paired with other, stronger characters, in a complementary role, like Luke Cage

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The whitest thing I’ve ever done

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend, mythical gf and I went to South Carolina to see the Carolina Cup, which is a series of horse races.  Leading up to what, I have no fucking clue, but it was billed to me as an event of drinking, eating, drinking, socializing, drinking and if you’re lucky, you might even get to see a horse run by.  I mean, it sounded like a good idea to me, honestly.

Now I don’t intend for the title of this post to imply that I did not have a good time, quite the contrary, I enjoyed myself a good deal, and I would be happy doing it again in the future.  But make absolutely no mistake that the headline is 100% accurate, and of all the things I’ve ever done in my life, there is without any hesitation, question or debate that this was undoubtedly the whitest thing I’ve ever done.

Men frolicking around in linen suits and/or khaki everything, with shirts featuring more pastels than Crayola’s Easter crayon collection.  Women wearing gaudy dresses and gigantic doofy hats.  And food and alcohol pretty much everywhere, and for an event that’s revolves around four horse races, people bring enough to indulge for at least sun up until sun down.

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An ugly, ugly classic

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If there’s ever any reason why college basketball is so often lauded as amongst the most exciting of sports is that it’s seldom that its annual national championship is ever decided in a decisive or completely unanimous manner.  It doesn’t matter if a team goes undefeated throughout the regular season, they will inevitably run into a serious contender be it a team from another conference, or the Cinderella story that’s making a miracle run, or a team that hatched the perfect plan to counter them, or sometimes all of the above.

The 2016-2017 National Championship game seemed kind of lackluster in the sense that it featured two #1 seeds, in Gonzaga University against the oft-present University of North Carolina, especially since the Zags took down Cinderella in the Final Four when they took out South Carolina and UNC dropped Oregon who was having their own surprisingly deep run in the tournament.  But few people ever want to see two #1s going at it for the National Championship, since that’s kind of the expectation, and sports fans typically want to see the unexpected, the Cinderellas, and the underdogs prevail.

But as is often the case with the National Championship, the game was definitely no snoozer, and despite the claims and the accusations that Gonzaga was a paper #1, meaning they didn’t really deserve their rank on account of playing in a weak conference, especially in contrast to their opponents who plays in the ACC against very strong basketball programs like Virginia, Louisville, Syracuse and Duke, they still showed up to play, and gave UNC tremendous resistance in a hard-fought, foul-plagued and ugly slugfest of a basketball game.

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The adaptation period, I suppose

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I couldn’t sleep.  Not because I took a nap earlier in the day or because I drank too much caffeine, my brain was simply too actively thinking to the point of where it was compromising my ability to fall asleep.  The selling of my house and the subsequent reconfiguration of life was undoubtedly a substantial change, but with the change has come some new lines of thinking as the result of the murky waters of what new paths lie ahead of me in the course of my life.

The one very particular thing that my brain was wrestling with throughout the evening was, something that I haven’t really given that much thought to in the past, other than cursory ideas that never were taken very seriously, resulting myself to fall back into my content little bubble of routine.  I’m talking about my career, as a graphic designer.  Lately, I feel like I’ve been tapping at the ceiling of my current career path, and unless I want to resign myself to staying dormant and padding years doing what I do, I can do that, but then the result of such a choice leads to a lot of fairly time-consuming and not necessarily very lofty end games, that I’d question if I’d be content with when I’m well into my 40s and 50s.

It’s not so much the career I’ve been feeling some discontent with, it’s also the money that comes along with what I do.  Honestly, I’ve never really been that driven by money; I know what I like to make in order to live comfortably within my means, but I’m also not blind to the working world around me, and that there are plenty of other designers with specializations more attuned to the current creative market, that make noticeably more money than I do, albeit with an equally proportionate higher risk of job security than I have.  But there are plenty of those in the creative marketplace that make more money than I do, and up until recently, I’ve been fine with that.

But I think I’ve been content over the last 13 years living in a household where the combined income was one that was pretty well into the upper-middle class echelon, and now that I’m basically on my own now, such numbers don’t look nearly as promising or conveying potential for loan repayment when it comes to planning for the future, like another house.  Suddenly, I’m feeling like my earning capabilities aren’t just inadequate, but not necessarily conducive to saving at a rate that would make the future not feel like too far away.

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