Tag: memes

Avengers: Endgame and the obnoxious evolution of hype

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: I may or may not say things that might be interpreted as spoilers for the movie.  But then again considering the fact that I am still offline, it could be weeks or literal years before anyone other than myself sees this post.  Always good to maintain good brogging etiquette though.

So mythical fiancée and I went and saw Avengers: Endgame today.  It’s been two days since the formal release date of the film, but because Hollywood ticket sales data is weird and loves to fudge things to make profits sound way more impressive than they might actually be, it could be anywhere from three to four days since other people of the mostly public world has been watching it.

Typically, this is the type of film that I don’t exactly make such an effort to see so immediately after its release.  Frankly, I didn’t even see Avengers: Infinity War in theaters, and didn’t actually watch it until it started to be available for home releases.  But as a person who was raised heavily on comic books, and as someone who actually read the actual Infinity War/Gauntlet/Crusades comic book arcs, it was still something that I’d be interested in, and despite the fact that I’m not exactly a opening night/special screenings kind of seeker, I’ve still kept up pretty well with just about all of the films of the general Marvel Studios Phase 1 series.

However, because the world is so connected and locked into the internet these days, and damn near everyone is attached to social media in some way, shape or form, I felt somewhat of an urgency to watch Endgame on the earlier side of the spectrum, solely for the fact that I recognize that the citizens of the internet, be it through news and pop culture websites, or through social media itself, are completely incapable of not spoiling things, and waiting to watch anything runs the serious risk of having anything and everything spoiled for you, by people on the internet who just can’t shut the fuck up.

So, we went and watched Endgame.  2-4 days after its initial release.  And it was good.  A solid film that tied up just about every loose end that was unraveled throughout the last 11 years of Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Lots of comedic moments here, some very serious moments there, some slightly eye-rolly fan service moments occasionally, and a few nods to the actual comics, which nerds like me probably recognized.  As I said, it was a solid flick that was fairly enjoyable, and didn’t feel like the three hours that many bemoaned was going to be a test to all viewer’s constitutions.

But do I think it lived up to the hype that the internet artificially created over the last few months?  Absolutely not.

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Go home, Atlanta’s full – really

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every now and then there will be some article about how the traffic in Atlanta is amongst the worst in the country or the world, or an article about how the housing market within the city proper is gradually climbing into San Francisco-like ascensions.  And then inevitably, like people flocking to the supermarkets for milk, bread and toilet paper at the news of oncoming snow, there will always be someone whether it’s through Twitter or any social media outlet, or in a comments section who says “go home, Atlanta’s full” or something of the like.

But then on the eve of the Super Bowl, which is being played in Atlanta this year, the city actually did become full; to the point where even the local NBC news outlet had no choice but to drop a headline that, Atlanta was full.  The meme became reality to where it had to not just be acknowledged by the media, but integrate it into the headlines.  And to prove that Atlanta was full, 11 Alive provided time-lapse video evidence of the clusterfuck of humanity that converged into Downtown Atlanta.

It looked like a more ghetto version of Shinjuku Station whenever the lights turned green and suddenly hundreds of people would cross the streets, filling up every inch of space in the process.

Frankly, when I knew that the Super Bowl was coming to Atlanta, not that I have a tremendous amount of business in the city anymore now that I’ve moved back out to the ‘burbs, but I knew that anything within two weeks of the Super Bowl was a definite no-fly zone for going remotely anywhere near the city if it could absolutely be helped.  And seeing video evidence of just how full Atlanta became, just a night prior to the Super Bowl justified everything I thought was going to be the case, and made me very glad that I no longer worked or lived remotely anywhere within city proper limits.

Needless to say, it’s still hilarious to me that the meme became reality, even if it just reached critical mass on one of the numerous nights in which people flooded the city.  But it’s official, Atlanta was full; now everyone go home.

The Family Guy effect for sports

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not even going to pretend for two seconds that I’m a hockey fan.  The biggest importance of hockey in my life is Al Michaels’ call of Do You Believe in Miracles? from the 1980 Olympics when Team USA upset the Soviet Union in one of the greatest upsets in the history of sports.  Otherwise, I know and care very little about the sport, personally considering it fourth-tier in the hierarchy of professional sports.  I know a lot of names of players and teams mostly through osmosis of ESPN and other sports outlets I keep my ear to the ground with, but really I’ve given no shits about the NHL ever in the history of my life.

However, it hasn’t been lost on me that over the last few years, the Washington Capitals have had some difficulty in overcoming the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Something like the Penguins winning three straight playoff matchups against the Capitals, en route to winning the Stanley Cup each time or something or other.  A cursory search shows that that the Penguins won seven consecutive playoff series against the Capitals since 1995.

This stigma had been amplified over the prior two seasons, with the respective stars of both squads, Alexander Ovechkin of Washington and Sidney Crosby of Pittsburgh in the primes of their careers, as well as the ever-prevalent and pervasive presence of social media for all the fairweather and casual fans to blow shit up more than others might want.  And as had been the norm, the Penguins ended the seasons for the Caps, and went on to win Stanley Cups each time, while fans in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area bemoaned the seemingly endless curse of DC sports.

When I noticed that the Caps and Penguins were on yet another collision course in this year’s NHL Playoffs, I talked a few times with a close friend who is an actual hockey fan, and a Caps fan no less.  And as a DC sports enthusiast, he’s pretty much been there, done that as far as the low expectations for sports teams in DC, regardless of their records or the hype.  Whether it’s the Redskins, Nationals, Wizards or Capitals, we’ve all seen them ascend to contention, only to fall from grace, perpetuating the stereotype with each crushing defeat.

We basically talked about how it was about to be another year, another Caps jobbing to the Penguins, and to prematurely begin engraving the Stanley Cup with this year’s Penguins personnel.  And then the Penguins went on to win game 1 of the best of seven, further reinforcing the feeling of déjà vu of another Caps shortcoming and another DC sports team, collapsing.

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Just when you think the NBA couldn’t get any dumber

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was naïve of me to think that the Houston Rockets attempting a million three pointers when it was apparent that nobody had the NBA Jam fire code running was the dumbest thing to happen in the playoffs.  After all, the NBA Finals hadn’t yet occurred.  And much like tempting Murphy’s Law, something worse must occur.

Obviously, I didn’t watch the vast majority of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, but thankfully I watched the part that really mattered.  Where Cavaliers guard JR Smith corralled an offensive rebound on a missed free throw, with the score tied at 107 with five seconds left, but instead of calling for a timeout or attempting a game-winner, he dribbled it out to half court and let time expire – much to the abhorrent dismay of his teammates who clearly understood the situation better than he did.

Despite the fact that Smith alleges that he thought a timeout would be called or he was going to get fouled, the fact of the matter is that he clearly was not aware that the score was tied, and that he could have very well won the game, had he even bothered trying to get a shot up or passed it off to someone else who could.  Commentators quickly and often, pointed out claiming to have heard that immediately after the gaffe, Smith claimed to have “thought we were ahead,” which is mortifying that a guy would lose track of the score, in the NBA Finals.

This isn’t really a big deal if the Cavaliers won the game, but naturally they lost in overtime, magnifying the incident fifty times over, as the sole reason why they lost.  And this isn’t an instance where a player could politically correctly state that the team lost as a team, because LeBron James scored 51 points and JR Smith’s brain fart is what denied the Cavs a chance to even win in regulation.

Bottom line is, JR Smith is an idiot.  He’s a bonehead that somehow managed to lose track of the situation in the most critical part of the game in the most critical part of the season, in the NBA Finals.  Regardless of if he actually knew the situation and was hoping for a time out or to pass the ball off, or he did in fact forget, neither changes the fact that he’s an idiot.  His excuse that he was waiting for a timeout or that he was going to get fouled is weak, because as the ballholder, he himself could have called for a time out, several of tenths of a second faster than the coach could have, but he didn’t want to take accountability for that decision.  Or, despite the fact that when he snatched the offensive rebound, he had the ten-foot tall Kevin Durant up in the air and could very easily have gotten up a fairly uncontested shot at close range up and made a game winner, but again, no accountability assumed there either.  Neither of which are any better than simply having forgotten the score at the most juncture of the game.

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Growing Up Type-R

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know I touched on this subject before in the past at some point, but seeing as how the car has been green lit very similarly to the initial concepts, it doesn’t hurt to revisit this.  Sure, cars rarely change dramatically from their concept stages, and I wasn’t expecting the Civic Type-Riceboy to go from Gran Turismo Edit B pocket rocket to a sleek sophisticated sleeper, but we all can wish, right?

Anyway, upon seeing the updated photos of the release model, the first thought that popped into my head was the immediate comparison to the Homer Simpson car that tanked his half-brother’s original fortune, that’s how clown-y it looked, with its giant spoiler that I’m sure will be described as “aggressive” and face that looks like a smashed down Stormtrooper helmet.

And that’s just the superficial details that aren’t to the standard that I once held the vaunted Civic Type-R when I was still 19.

Mechanically, it’s definitely the strongest Civic, and one of the strongest Hondas in general off the factory line in history, but there too, it seems to have lost all the cool shit that made Hondas back in the late 90s.  An alleged 306 horsepower is advertised, but it’s coming from a turbocharged 2.0 liter with a redline of “just” 6,500 rpm.

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Oh, MARTA #100

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, I can’t have entitled this “Oh, MARTA #1,” because I’ve been chronicling MARTA fuck up stories for a few years now, but at the same time, I didn’t feel that this particular incident could just be summed up in the arbitrary numbers that I make up on the fly that make it sound like MARTA fucks up way more often than they actually do although it’s not really that much of a stretch to believe if they did.

So much like they do in comic books or any sort of regular periodical, I figure to just let’s just call this commemorative #100, because it truly was a MARTA incident that can’t simply be recognized with some made-up number.

As the story goes, since it all happened while I was overseas, the long-awaited implosion of the Georgia Dome, as covered by The Weather Channel, had their video feed utterly and completely ruined by a MARTA bus that just so perfectly timed its arrival into the shot right as the initial charges went off and the Georgia Dome came crumbling down.  Usually, I like to believe that I’m capable of coming up with way better headlines and descriptions of events than popular media does, because I don’t have to play by the rules of censorship or any sort of policing.  But when scuttlebutt declared the event as “The most Atlanta thing to ever happen” or something along those lines, I simply had to shake my head and just agree.

Seriously, I can’t really think of something more symbolic of Atlanta than a MARTA bus photobombing a momentous occasion.  And you know the driver had no fucking clue of its actions, as it was probably some wage slave just doing their daily job, trying to keep to the schedule and continuing to move . . . people, routinely through Atlanta.  But to the people at The Weather Channel who were completely banking on this footage, this was a cockblock that not even a Michael Cera film could have possibly executed. 

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Hashtag white-washing lol

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Ghost in the Shell starring Japan’s own Scarlett Johansson attempts to create promotional meme; blows up in their face like Japan’s own bukkake

Honestly, I thought too much time had passed for me to bother talking about the white-washing of GITS.  Sure, I’ve got lots of opinions about whitey taking over yet another story conceived and taking place in ‘ze Orient, but none of them would really be any different than the litany of white guilt white knights that are all over the internet crying over the injustice of it already.

I mean there was a movie about the Great Wall; of China, starring fucking Matt Damon of all the people on the face of the planet, so it shouldn’t be the least bit surprising that GITS would star a woman as Japanese as Scarlett Johansson as the lead character.  I don’t think we’re that far off with a remake of Roots, starring Topher Grace as Kunta Kinte, or perhaps a rendition of Frida starring Blake Lively as the titular Frida Kahlo, and neither would be a surprise if such were to occur.

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