Tag: fail

If only I were in my 30s again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There have been multiple times in my life in which I have thought that I was born in the wrong time.  Like whenever I see professional gamers and how revered they are in Korea and how worshipped they are in the gaming community, I think to myself that maybe that could’ve been me, had I been born in like ten years later than I was, where my parents wouldn’t have discouraged and shamed my love of video games and instead nurtured and encouraged them, and maybe I could’ve ended up like Faker or Daigo or some other professional gamer that makes millions of dollars playing video games and streaming video games today.

Lately, I’ve been having those similar thoughts again because for whatever reason, the social media algorithm has decided to start providing me reels of all these people who basically do nothing but film themselves, going around doing mundane things by themselves, but usually prefaced with a caption of “single 30-something does X in a day,” and it’s a 45-70 second reel of them going around, doing mundane things, with the underlying hook being that they’re doing it peacefully and without anyone bothering them.

Grocery shopping, visiting some local restaurant, going on a run, hitting the gym, driving around, eating some more food, cooking food that they’ll eat, getting and/or drinking a fancy coffee; running some mundane errands but doing it at their own pace and leisure.

These videos will all have hundreds to thousands of reactions, comments and seemingly very high engagement numbers, and although it might be all by bots, the stats are still stats, and undoubtedly these people are making money doing such.  They all have templated formats, cold opens and tiny gimmicks, presumably to make them who they are, but at the root of things, they’re still just doing mundane crap, and it just so happens that they’re not all unattractive blobs of humanity, they’re admittedly watchable.

I just can’t help but think that if I were in my 30s now, when I was single forever, and had pretty much nothing but time on my hands when I wasn’t working, I could be in on this hustle, and be making a bunch of videos about my mundane life and presumably be getting paid to do it, and when I got tired of doing it, I’d have a million bucks in my bank account to where I could have the seed money to perhaps embark on to my current life, but with moar capital backing me up.

Seriously, I’m not sure I could churn out content at the rate as many of these creators do, but I think about the things that I have done in my life throughout my 30s, and wonder if some things would be worth making content out of.

  • 30-year old single Korean-American travels to X to visit MLB team/park/city
  • A day in the life of a 31-year old Korean living in Atlanta
  • How a 32-year old single Korean guy prepares for standby travel
  • 33-year old single Korean guy gets stranded in Minneapolis
  • Dragon*con with a 34-year old single Korean guy
  • 35-year old Korean guy visits Korea for the very first time

Shit, I could do what a lot of the creators do now.  Albeit perhaps with less of the extravagances they subtly like to flex, like how all their cars seem to be way high-end, or they have designer belongings, but I like to go to coffee shops and restaurants, and I could film myself walking into a gym or an H-Mart.  Film myself going to my computer “to work” and all the other inane bullshit that all these creators do.

And when the cameras aren’t rolling, basking in the largely positive ratio of engagement scores that my content is generating, and waiting for all the digital media money to start rolling in, and encouraging me to keep going.

Nah, instead I’m in my mid-40s now, married with kids, and I’m not saying that they’re the reason why I couldn’t embark on a new career of being a content creator, it’s just that I know that content creation is an largely, wholly time-consuming endeavor to embark on, and personally it’s more important to be present with my family and children versus getting caught up in the rat race of trying to produce, film, edit, and post content, and knowing my luck, by the time I get the machine rolling, the content creation bubble will pop, and it won’t be nearly as lucrative then as it is now.

And ironically, the new moneyball of making money, would be getting a fucking job, doing it, and getting these periodic things called paychecks.

But, nothing is ever going to change until I get in on things, because I am begrudgingly the master of the universe, and nothing happens until I decide to get involved.  If I did what the single 30s somethings are doing today, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as monetarily viable as it is now.

The 6,000 lb. letdown

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of My 600 Lb. Life, and I was extremely disappointed when the show seemingly came to a slow, uneventful finish after the conclusion of season 13.  Periodically I would Google the show to find out when there was going to be another season, which turned into if there was going to be another season, and all I’d ever find are vague speculations of legal troubles between the production company and TLC and other fans speculating that perhaps Dr. Now was perhaps calling it quits considering he’s 80 years old and should rightfully probably be enjoying retirement without the stress of holding human lives in his fingertips on a regular basis.

Eventually, my curiosity petered off, lost to the passage of time and finding other things to think about.  Recently however, mythical wife brought to my attention that Dr. Now was back on television, albeit no longer called My 600 lb. Life and no longer on TLC.  Rechristened The 6,000 lb. Diaries with Dr. Now, on Lifetime/A&E, I came to discover that this show had been on since fucking 2025 and I’m asking myself how in the world did this not hit my radar, we’re over halfway through 2026 and I had no clue that this show even existed. 

I know that I’m a busy parent, endlessly struggling to keep his head above water and often times miss out on all sorts of crap, but shit goddamn, you’d think one of the numerous algorithms, AI or other big brother-ey crap out there in the world would have brought to my attention the return of Dr. Now to television and made me aware of this last year.

Either way, despite the fact that I have an endless list of television and movies that I want to watch, I shot 6,000 lb. Diaries to the front of the line because I had to see what the fuck Dr. Now was up to now, after all this time.

First, I love the notion that because of the title of the show, people at A&E/Lifetime/TLC/whoever else is under that giant fucking Disney umbrella had to look for the right ten people to have in the first season, so that they could maintain their claim that the total weight of all subjects combined to be at or over 6,000 lbs.  Like there probably had to have been some 590 lb. cruiserweights who were on the show’s shortlist of people to be featured on the show, but their diminutive statures risked the entire show’s aggregate weight down to like 5,967 lbs., so they got passed over for Caleb who weighed in at 804 lbs. and guaranteed that the show could definitely be called 6,000 lb. Diaries.

Anyway, mythical wife and I dove right in, with high hopes and anticipation for some more juicy trainwreck television, and some classic Dr. Now snipes and savage heat.  I was so excited about the season that I didn’t even bother to wait until finishing the entire season to post about it, because as much as I’d love to binge watch anything anymore, with barely two hours of free time a day, shit just ain’t happening.

So five episodes in, and I’m disappointed to have to say that unfortunately I’m not impressed.  Like, at all.  There are a lot of changes to the show’s general format, some decent, some not quite so, but the high-level biggest change of the show really is the noticeable reduction of, the man himself, Dr. Nowzaradan (Bariatric Surgeon).  And when Dr. Now is on screen, it’s almost as if he or someone else has told him(self) to cool it and tone it down with the zingers and the heat, and viewers are not getting any savage snipes or cold remarks that made him such a legend during My 600.

Additionally, and I’m not saying that I deliberately want to see everyone fail, but every single subject of The 6,000 has been successful, at meeting their initial weight loss goals, getting approved for surgery, and getting said surgery, before dropping some more weight post-op, before the episodes end.  It’s not that I’m against them finding success, it’s just that every single subject I’ve seen so far are all genuinely decent-to-likeable people who aren’t trainwrecks, aren’t behavioral problems aside from their overeating, and frankly just aren’t the quality of trash television that made My 600 such riveting television.

I know that says more about my person than anything else, but I’d wager that I’m not the only one feeling this upon watching The 6,000 after being long fans of My 600.  Mythical wife said to me that the show has become too wholesome when I’m wanting trainwreck, and that’s why I’m struggling to get into The 6,000 so much.

Just about everything has changed going from 600 to 6,000.  No longer does the show start with the crushingly sad music, where the subjects trudge out of bed, take a shower before eating an entire family’s worth of breakfast by themselves, go see the ‘doctor in houston’ where Dr. Now gives them the plan, they say they can do it, fail to meet the first weight loss test, get sad or mad, Dr. Now rips into them, they fail again, Dr. Now rips into them again but orders them to get therapy and move to Houston, they move to Houston or not, and the show usually runs out of time before they can get surgery and we never know what happens to them because most people probably aren’t so diehard they’ll wait for the Where Are They Now sequels to every subject.

6,000 has done away with almost all of that, all the way down to the music and title cards, which are now more positive, sky blue and uplifting.  The subjects are bubblier, and are all equipped with personal cams to record “diaries” which make up a chunk of the show’s viewable content, probably saving A&E a lot of money with fewer camera personnel to have to follow.  Gone is a lot of filler footage, mostly of their struggles, like inability to move, complaining while traveling, pigging out on fast food in the parking lots of adjacent Walmarts and general bickering with their enablers. 

The episodes are anywhere from 39-55 minutes, which kind of shows just how bloated My 600 episodes must have gotten with all that filler trash footage.  And as I’ve often said, I’ve grown to appreciate shorter episodes as I’ve gotten older and value my time more, but at the same time, I’m missing the trainwreck drama of the old format, even if it meant only watching one 88-98 minute episode a night.

I feel like holistically everything changed, probably because the old format of My 600 was probably sucking the souls out of everyone, from the viewers to Dr. Now himself.  It’s like they’re trying to course-correct 13 gradually degrading seasons of My 600 with a faster-paced, more uplifting format, focusing more on the victories and not so much the struggles, and with way less Dr. Now on screen, seeing as how the man is 81, and has probably spent the better part of the last 13 seasons getting beat down by all the failure stories and all the asshole subjects that TLC was probably deliberately hand-picking to get the spiciest television out of their interactions with an exasperated and burnt-out Dr. Now. 

At the root of it, Dr. Now is still a very real and very legitimate doctor, and it’s probably providing a lot of chicken soup for his personal and professional soul to have his wins and success stories being shown nationally, instead of all his fuck-ups and failures being the only ones that make it onto television, even if the Assanti Brothers and other trainwrecks were some of the most memorable episodes of the My 600 library.

It seems evident by his on-screen interactions with the subjects of The 6,000; five episodes in, and I haven’t heard a single biting zinger or cutting remark to anyone who’s sitting in Not-Room 5 which is another noticeable format change, having them all sit in a completely different room than where every episode of My 600 was filmed in.  He still calls out shortcomings of missing a goal by 6-10 lbs., and is quick to identify who the enablers are, but he’s also seemingly calmer, and even apt to show some personality or humor.

I get it.  But I miss the savage Dr. Now, even if it was probably to the benefit of nobody actually in the room.

Change is inevitable, and when the day is over, change in the direction of wanting to be more positive is not a bad thing, even if it means less entertainment for callous cold hearts like me.  However, in the world of television and the game of ratings, I’m going to go out on a limb and make the assumption that The 6,000 lb. Diaries won’t have nearly the success that My 600 lb. Life did, and I don’t really know if I’m going to be in any rush to complete the season of the new show.  Disheartening, but that’s the reality of television sometimes.  As Eric Bischoff once said, controversy creates cash.

Braves Job Alert: mid-tier Latino pitchers pls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I saw a news article about how a former Atlanta Braves pitcher, Carlos Carrasco, had signed with the LG Twins of the Korea Baseball Organization.  This tingled my spider-senses because it was about baseball, it was about a guy who had been on the Braves, it was about Korea, it was about the KBO, where I had just seen a game for the first time, and it also just so happened to have featured the LG Twins; who lost to the Doosan Bears in spite of being the team with the better record when they play, but hey that’s why the play the games.

Anyway, in spite of my general ambivalence and distance from the Braves and just sports in general, I am familiar with Carlos Carrasco, because he was a guy on the team that it seemed to be notorious that he was cut from the major league roster pretty much every other week, before being re-signed by the Braves, pitch in a game or two, before being designated for assignment again, and the cycle would repeat itself, seemingly over and over again.

That’s not the kind of distinction any player should want, but for a bad sports fan like me who is more often times fascinated by the weird and interesting happenstances of sports, it’s how I remembered who he was.

It was in the 2025 season that I first noticed the pattern of Carrasco being jerked around, because it seemed to happen a lot, way more than I’d noticed it happening to any player before.  I mean, Uncle Jesse Chavez got a similar treatment in prior years, especially by the Braves, but not to the frequency in which it was happening to Carrasco.

According to Gemini, Carrasco’s 2025 season actually was, the most extreme case of revolving door roster ping-ponging for any player in history, as the poor guy was released and brought back an unprecedented seven times throughout the season. 

My knee-jerk reaction was that this had to have been related to the cheap-ass Braves wanting to save money and that the small gaps in between his cuts and re-signings, they’d be absolved of having to pay prorated daily wages, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how contracts work and that he was still due his contracted amount, and that his roster spot was more valuable and the chief reason for constantly shuffling him around. 

But at the same time, I don’t think the cheap-ass Braves’ payroll department was complaining about the lack of logistics and per-diem envelopes they were saving by the occasional absence of his physical being, so fuck those cheap bean counters all the same.

But the thing is, and I touched on it a second ago, with Jesse Chavez getting a similar treatment before Carrasco, is that I’ve come to the scientifically proven conclusion* that the Atlanta Braves seem to require the need to have a Latino pitcher of the mediocre, swingman variety, that they will jerk around back and forth on the roster and give them absolutely no chance to breathe, settle in, or genuinely feel like a part of the team.

*As much as I don’t want to have to explain that this is tongue-in-cheek, and that I have zero readers, I’ve been dealing with a lot of astonishingly stupid people on the internet and that’s my bad for engaging communities in the first place

So, it started, or rather I actually noticed this, in 2024, with the aforementioned Jesse Chavez; the man was already beloved in Atlanta, and prior to 2024, already had four prior stints with the Braves, including being a member of the 2021 World Series squad.  But after his championship contributions, the team didn’t get caught up in recency bias, let him walk, and he signed with the Cubs in 2022, where he did not start well, and in April, was traded back to the Braves, where he suddenly turned back into good Uncle Jesse, and pitched so well that the team was able to sell high on him and traded him to the Angels that August.  Apparently, changing out of his Braves uni made him suck again, and not even a full month later, the Angels cut him, and take a guess who was waiting to pick him back up?  The Braves.  Naturally, he pitched well for Atlanta again, and there was a funny narrative that was born about how he sucked for everyone except the Braves.

Uncle Jesse would sign and stay with the Braves for the entire 2023 season, and because he was on the Braves, he pitched well, enough to where he parlayed it into signing with the White Sox for more money the following season.  He bombed out in Spring Training and the Sox were forced to cut him, and naturally the Braves would pick him back up, and with someone else picking up half of his salary, would deliver again.  And then he’d sign with the Texas Rangers, suck, and of course the Braves would snatch him up again.

Which brings us to the 2025 season, where at 41, the magic was wearing off, and even in the magical Braves uni that gave him so much strength in the past, Chavez had become the next victim to the undefeated Father Time, his ERA ballooned up to 9.00, and the revolving door roller coaster began.  Two times he was cut and picked back up, with the second one of those he wasn’t even used, but it was at his third cut on July 17, 2025 that Chavez would declare his retirement from the game outright.

And on July 31, 2025, Carlos Carrasco was called up from the minor leagues.  I don’t know if he realized it, but he was basically going to be filling the void that Jesse Chavez had left behind, and he would remain on the squad for two weeks before getting his first cut, and then be brought back to finish out the season, literally one day later.

November 6, 2025, Carrasco would be cut by the Braves which is funny because the season was already over, but this would effectively be start of the 2026 season, where he would be about to make history:

11.06.25: cut by Braves (1)
11.08.25: signed by Braves
04.30.26: cut by Braves (2)
05.01.26: signed by Braves
05.07.26: cut by Braves (3)
05.08.26: signed by Braves
05.31.26: cut by Braves (4)
06.02.26: signed by Braves
06.12.26: cut by Braves (5)
06.15.26: signed by Braves
06.26.26: cut by Braves (6)
07.05.26: signed by Braves
07.09.26: cut by Braves (7)
07.22.26: signed by LG Twins

The scary thing is that this was just half of the season.  Imagine how many more times Carrasco would have ping-ponged in the months of July and August alone, before September call-ups would have probably done him in.

My knee-jerk reaction was naturally of amusement, and how Carrasco was probably thrilled to be getting a steady paycheck and probably have a consistent locker to use for the remainder of the 2026 season, even if he had to pack all his shit and go to Korea.  But the results speak for themselves, in his first start, Carrasco pitched seven perfect innings against the Doosan Bears, setting himself up to look like a demigod in Korea after being a training dummy in MLB.

Which brings us to the third guy in the picture above, Elieser Hernandez.  He’s no spring chicken at 31 years of age, and his MLB experience is nothing to sign about, having around 300 innings over six years of MLB experience, pitching in a variety of roles.  His career ERA was 5.10 prior to coming to the Braves. 

However, with the departure of Carrasco, Hernandez was called up on July 19, 2026, and he made his presence felt for Braves fans when he came out of the bullpen in a slugfest with the Baltimore Orioles on July 24, 2026, and pitched three innings of one-hit ball, getting the win.

He was promptly rewarded for his heroics by getting cut by the Braves on July 27, 2026, but he would re-sign with the team one day later.  Three days after that, he’d pitch three innings in a win against the Washington Nationals, notching an old-school three inning save, and I’m sure there’s some obscure stat where Elieser Hernandez is the first guy in MLB history to have his first two appearances with a team getting a Win and a Save, with a DFA in between.

Guess what happened two days ago?
August 3, 2026: Elieser Hernandez released by the Braves.

But then guess what happened one day ago?
August 4, 2026: Elieser Hernandez signed by the Braves.

Obviously the game is different now than it was five, ten, and twenty years ago.  Roster management is more important than it’s ever been, especially for poor teams and crying-poor teams who need to maximize their processes and efficiencies as optimally as possible to hope to have a prayer at competing against the Dodgers and their billion-dollar payroll of superstars that don’t have to be micromanaged.

And I’d be naïve if I didn’t assume that this is the kind of behavior that every team does to a degree, and that it’s not just the cheap-ass Braves doing it.  But it funny to conclude with the narrative that the Atlanta Braves have this mandatory requirement to have a Latino pitcher to be repeatedly spinning through the ringer, cutting and re-signing over and over again, and frankly it’s probably this kind of front office bullshit that will surely be a bullet point of contention this off-season when the owners and MLB players union embark on their collision course for next season’s inevitable strike.

SummerSlam, blets and moments

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t watch SummerSlam, nor did I actually care to even exert a modicum of effort in order to watch it.  I know that my general fandom of the WWE product has been tested and waning over the last year or so and the grand consensus of all the changes and corporatization of the company is resulting in me gaining more and more distance from the product like it were 1990 all over again and my parents cancelling cable television, preventing me from keeping up with the biz.

Every show is behind a different pay wall, Fanatics has standardized and priced merchandise to inaccessibility, and frankly the product blows chunks now.  Storylines are convoluted and limited to the smallest of pools, and RAW on Netflix is so overwhelmingly buried in ads, I sometimes feel like I’m watching a pirated stream instead of a program that I’m paying a subscription to watch.

That being said, when one of my bros asked our group chat if anyone were watching SummerSlam, it took me 0.2 seconds to respond ‘no.’  I left out the part that I thought it was probably going to be mid as fuck, and the whole two-night show thing that TKO is trying to force like it’s a second Wrestlemania seems like bullshit and when the day is over, there were only two matches on the entire event that I remotely cared about.

Additionally, I knew that there was little point to watching the show, given the fact that with maybe an 18-minute delay, the results of every single match would be spoiled and revealed on various social media outlets, and I could get the Cliff’s notes on the entire show without having to sit through all the ads, rest holds, and botches from the gradual blunting of talent over the last years.

The good news for me was that the two matches I did care about, ended in the ways that I was happy with.  One was predictable, which was the culmination of Chad Gable’s redemption story, with him defeating Penta for the Intercontinental championship.  In the past, I would’ve said for certain that Gable was going to lose, because in the Vince McMahon era of the company, it was almost an unwritten rule that superstars did not win in their hometowns, but in the TKO era, they’re so obsessed with creating moments but more importantly farming footage for future UnTolds, that stuff like this flips, and it’s become pretty predictable, even moreso than it used to be, even for a wrestling oracle like myself.

But still, I’m happy to see Chad Gable get a signature W at the event, because the man has been one of the hardest working and mold-breaking performers over the last few years and it always brings me great joy to see hard workers get their just desserts.

The other match I was intrigued in, ended in really the only winner I had hoped for, but assumed was not going to be the case, which was Chelsea Green climbing to the top of the ladder and winning the Women’s championship, made vacant by the very legitimate Rhea Ripley injury.

As much as I love Chelsea and the internet loves Chelsea, there’s no denying that the E has treated her like this expendable comedy act, and given the fact that she was in the match with former champions like Charlotte, Jade Cargill and Tiffany Stratton, it seemed more likely the E would give it to one of the safe choices, and that Chelsea was there to provide some highlights and outstanding character work.

But the E loves to give surprises, and like I had mentioned, I’m convinced now that they’re so fixated on creating compelling content for UnTold documentaries, they allowed for the impossible to happen, and regardless of their motivations, I was stoked to discover that Chelsea Green had outlasted all the competition, and walked away as the new women’s champion.

Naturally, both these matches occurred on Night 2 of SummerSlam, and if the E really wants to ensure that two-day events have any modicum of succeeding in the long run, they have got to stop backloading their events so blatantly, because history has not been kind to the small number of two-day events they’ve held thusfar, with Night 1 shows being mid as fuck compared to their Night 2 counterparts.

Among the ocean of mediocrity that was the rest of SummerSlam, what stood out to me the most was the introduction of, what’s being called the ESPN Moment of the Night championship blet, inconsequentially being handed out, pretty informally on social media, to the worker of the show that, much to the low-hanging fruit name of the title goes, perceived to have made the best moment of the night.

Night 1 of SummerSlam, the “title” went to Oba Femi, presumably because of his emotional and landmark victory over Brock Lesnar, supposedly ending the career of one of the most impactful performers in the history of the business.  I mean, considering what else was on the card that night, it was pretty low-hanging fruit, and much like the importance of what the title represents, it’s pretty useless, and for a jaded smark like me, actually more of a detriment, because I kind of see it as ESPN giving a middle finger to all the oldhead fans like myself who don’t like all these paywalls, all these separate services, and all the infectious corporatization of the product we once loved so much.

That being said, as happy as I was to see Chelsea Green win the Women’s championship, it was like someone peeing into the pool of celebration when I later saw that ESPN had “awarded” her with the ESPN moment of the night blet, and seeing it on her shoulder in conjunction with an infinitely more meaningful prize on her other.  Fewer things spoil a good time than the arrival of the asshole that everyone doesn’t like but feels obligated to be civil towards because they have a lot of money and influence.

Either way, I’m stoked that performers I like got their flowers and moments at SummerSlam, but at same time I feel satisfied with my choice to not bother watching or pursuing the show because aside from those two matches I don’t really feel like I missed anything, and even if there were, it’s not like I wouldn’t be able to find it on YouTube or any other temporary hosting of the important things.

But that fucking ESPN blet, it is astonishing, that TKO has managed to create a championship blet that is somehow more meaningless and has less importance than any of the 25 straps circulating in the AEW/ROH wrestling space, as well as any of the 14 straps that Mercedes Mone was concurrently holding a little while back.

The white font is still undefeated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The Register: Alcorn State professor uses white text hidden in assignment instructions to phish out AI-using cheaters, catching 32 out of 35 students

A long time ago, during one of the agonizingly arduous job searches in my life, I once filled out an application that took me the better part of an hour to complete, what with all the PII I had to disclose, as well basically manually typing in all of my resume’s information, while uploading the resume itself, as well as composing a thoughtful cover letter that basically said hi my name is danny look at my resume to see why i believe I can do your shitty job.

Submit, confirmation email five minutes later, check the link to see what application status page looks like.

Applicant rejected.

Fucking seriously?  In five minutes?

It became apparent that I had been an immediate victim to bot screening, little possibility that any human had seen my application, and that my application had been phished out presumably because it did not contain any of the unknown criteria that the position had been looking for.

But really, I was incensed that nearly an hour of my already frustrating-on-account-of-being-unemployed life’s time had been wasted in less than five minutes because a fucking bot didn’t see enough of the words they needed to see in order to even consider my application for human eyes.

After the initial rage subsided, I decided to take a different approach to building my resume, taking into consideration that my resume was more than likely going to be passed through bot screeners that do little else than analyze the words they identify, with greenlit terms scoring higher and increasing my chances of getting seen by a human screener who then can possibly be convinced to reach out.

In both the Word doc and the InDesign-created PDF variants of my resume, I created floating text boxes on a separate layer, and wrote in every single term that I thought might increase my odds at ticking green flags from a bot screening; skills, software, awards, orientations, but mostly race-related.

adobe microsoft photoshop illustrator indesign acrobat flash html css java final cut video illustration mac mobile desktop print digital omni concepting art direction management

award winning accolade gallery featured magazine publication ad creative organization

gay lgbt lgtbq pride college university masters veteran military

asian black hispanic latino minority korean japanese african woman spanish bilingual language fluent

And then I’d set the entire block of text to white, and build out my actual resume on top of it.  Invisible to the human eye, but in the view of zeroes and ones that the bot sees, every single one of these terms is as clear as day, and my hope was always that if any of them helped flag my resume as worth looking at, why the fuck didn’t I think of this sooner.

I’m not saying that this tactic necessarily worked like I had invented Google, but I can say that I was never screened out of a position in five minutes ever again.  Maybe it’s on account of bots becoming as lazy as the humans who implemented them, maybe it’s because the bots’ processes aren’t disclosed anymore.  Maybe it’s all of the above, or maybe, just maybe, my tactic might have actually proved to be useful.

Needless to say, this story about the Alcorn State professor using white text to phish out and bust his own students, tickled me in a manner that brought great joy and great satisfaction to my soul.  The tactic is as old as when font color selection in word processor software was launched, and no manner of AI advancement has been able to get around the fact that at some point, humans are still involved in the process.

I already have a contentious opinion and relationship with AI, and of course everyone including this professor knew that people were lazy and were already utilizing it to do things that they should be doing and trying to pass the results off as their own.  And frankly, the fact that he ended up busting that many students in his class isn’t at all surprising, and the real surprise is how three of them didn’t get caught.

Because it’s not like the three that didn’t get caught probably weren’t cheating with AI either, it’s just they were probably the students that either had the 1-2 IQ points higher to have the wherewithal to review and proofread their AI-generated papers to catch the dummy prompt’s trapdoor in their assignments, and/or maybe they had an appearance setting in their device’s OS running to where they had any sort of colored background other than default white, and were able to see the dummy trap prompt in the assignment before they ran it through an AI.

Frankly, I’m more annoyed with the verbiage that states that the students were only partially failed, because I’d have failed them all outright.  AI-generated work is tantamount to plagiarism in my opinion, and in this day and age, a lot of time if people are not punished severely, they’re going to just look for ways to circumvent in the future, and not learn all the same.  I’m not saying that making them repeat and pay for class all over again won’t result in the same outcome, but at least the school might make some money on it in the process, and smarter people might think twice about doing it and might actually learn something when they do things themselves.

All the same, the real winner in this entire story is the white text strategy, which has proven to be as unbeatable now as it was in the 1980s when WordPerfect and Microsoft Word first came into existence.  As long as humans are involved in the process, failure will be too.

Hear me out: how to beat the Dodgers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The other day, I saw a clip of some K-pop baddie throwing out a first pitch at Citi Field in New York.  Jang Won-Young of some group called IVE, that I’ve never heard of did you see what I did there lol.  Tall, thin, obviously had the requisite work done in order to someone in Korean media, wearing a comically cropped Mets jersey.  Threw the pitch pretty straight but still bounced it, and the Mets scrub who got to receive the pitch couldn’t be any happier getting to stand next to a Korean baddie for a photo that will probably be in the highlight reel of his career.

I thought to myself, lol should’ve been a game against the dodgers, they always collapse when Korean baddies throw out the first pitch.  It turns out that this game was against the Dodgers, and the juggernaut Dodgers actually did collapse, getting blown out by the lowly Mets by a score of 8-3.

Naturally, this got the gears grinding in my brain, becoming curious of what the Win-Loss correlation between when cute Korean idols throw out the first pitch in games where the Dodgers are playing.  I didn’t dive too deep, and there are some notable gaps between some instances, but here’s the breakdown of what I was able to give a cursory dig into:

*I have no idea who MiSaMo is, the girls are all Japanese, but the group is technically classified as a K-pop group, a sub-group of Twice, which makes them count for this exercise

The funny thing is that what made me think of this theory was Jeon Jong-seo’s first pitch in 2024, where Dodger players all had their jaws on the ground as yellow fever overtook them, the Dodgers actually won that exhibition game against the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes, which kind of debunks my theory.  But I cherry-picked the notion that Jeon is not a K-pop musical act, but an actress, so if you’re keeping count, the Dodgers are the opposite of undefeated in games where Korean baddies throw out the first pitch. 

Two times is a coincidence, but five times is a pattern.

Aside from this astonishing research done by me, it’s funny how frequently the Dodgers seem to be getting paired up in games where little Korean hotties are throwing out first pitches.  There’s absolutely zero percent chance that MLB teams have made this correlation that only I could notice, and it’s probably coming more from a place of team management seeing the woefully weeb-ey Dodgers and their half-Japanese roster, assuming all Asians are the same, and tacking the Chinese girl to throw out the first pitch when they visit, to satisfy all those Koreans in the stands.

But you heard it here first.  It’s actually really quite simple to defeat the unstoppable Dodgers, just get some K-pop idols to throw out the first pitches of the games in which they’re in town.  Their white players can’t help crashing out from yellow fever, and their Japanese players probably can’t handle the pressure of having to perform in the presence of the inferior sex of the race they think is beneath them.

I’d be absolutely delighted if any MLB teams were to come across my Moneyball-like theory, and like in the playoffs, coincidentally just start trotting out all sorts of Korean baddies to throw out first pitches in critical games where they really need a W against the Dodgers.

Imagine dropping $120 for some Jerry Seinfelds

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: New Balance releases the 950s, featuring Cooper Flagg as their figurehead; retailing at $120

Initially, I wanted to write about how such a retail price is contrary to the supposed quote by reigning NBA Rookie of the Year, Cooper Flagg, where he stated that he wanted his first signature shoes to be priced at $35, so that all kids could afford them, but there’s a lot of claim that such quote was bogus, and so I don’t want to risk looking like an incorrect asshole, so I’ll disclaim the ambiguity of the quote.

However, if he did say something along those effects, and New Balance still said naaaahhhh, here’s your shoe, and we’re going to sell it for $120, then egg on Cooper Flagg for allowing it to stand, but let’s be real here, high integrity isn’t necessarily something basketball fans expect from those dudes who went to Duke.

I mean in all fairness, $120 isn’t a horrible price, considering the fact that just about any signature released by Nike or the Jordan sub-brand usually starts at like $200 and goes only up, and often time results in a couple of fatalities throughout the nation as overzealous sneakerheads resort to violence over some fucking sneakers.  But $120 is still a price point where the purported youngsters that Cooper Flagg had in mind probably still can’t afford, which then kind of defeats the purpose for that price point in the first place.

Especially when, when the day is over, the 950s are basically New Balance-branded knockoffs of Nike Air Force Ones, in that they’re all-white sneakers that look like Jerry Seinfeld would wear on the set of Seinfeld.  And then the question becomes, why the fuck would anyone pay $120 for bootleg AF1s when, if you play your cards right, you can get the OG AF1s for less than that.

Either way, I know that they dropped almost a month ago, but I’m just finding out about them now, and just about everything about this whole release seems like kind of a flop.  They’re overpriced clones, look like dorky Forrest Gump shoes, and if Flagg actually had claimed he wanted his shoes to be cheaper, then they failed there too.

But really, what really made this post into reality was the want to photoshop together imagery of Flagg with Jerry Seinfeld, united in their dorky all-whites joints.