Tag: new years

No better way to start the new year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Than with a Pepsi truck crashing on 285, dumping its contents all over the place and tying up traffic for hours.  This wreck actually impacted my commute this morning too, but I’m an early riser and somehow managed to avoid the worst of it; I figured it was just the whole world returning to work at the same time causing logjams.

Frankly, this wreck couldn’t really have been in a worse place at a worse time, considering it happened right at the 285/75 interchange, during the morning rush.  From what vague details there are, it sounds like the driver fell asleep at the wheel and veered off the road; they’re banged up, but fortunately still alive, but it leads me to wonder that this particular trucking company must not be one of those that employs a co-driver, which specifically is meant to prevent incidents like this from possibly occurring.

But whatever, it’s Pepsi, and Pepsi is second-rate, especially here in the land of Coke.  In almost a prideful way, it’s entertaining to see the visuals of a wrecked-up Pepsi truck, as if Pepsi done fucked up and came to the wrong neighborhood and immediately paid for it.  As if they knew that they were in hostile territory, tried to circumvent the city by taking 285, but were too late, and blown off the road barely after getting onto the bypass.

What’s interesting to me is that of the photos I’ve seen, the vast majority of the spilled cargo appears to be Dr. Pepper.  So it’s pretty clear that this is a truck that had no intention of really unloading here, because in Georgia, Dr. Pepper is a Coke product, showing up at all fountains and Freestyles under the Coke umbrella.  It also puts me in a conflicted position, because although it’s fun to dunk on Pepsi, I have no qualms with Dr. Pepper.  So it’s kind of sad to see large portions of Dr. Pepper go down the drain, but fuck them for being in a Pepsi truck.

Either way, this marks the first post of 2020, and in spite of the sentiments of new years and new beginnings, it’s pretty much business as usual at the brog.  Glorifying dumb shit like truck crashes and the hypocrisy of Georgia and other shitheads, that is when I’m not talking about professional wrestling, baseball players getting owned, or TLC programming.

Happy New Year!

How to reflect on a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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The year-end post, circa 2018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I believe more and more with each passing year, time begins to feel like it moves faster the older we get.  I go to work in the morning, do my thing there, come home, have dinner, tidy things up and do one or two tasks I had in mind, and then it’s suddenly 10 pm, and now I’m at the point of the day where I can’t really commit to anything too time-consuming, lest I put myself into a position of going to bed too late, and then being tired at work the next day, and therefore I usually just end up going to bed at a sensible time.

Rinse, repeat, and suddenly it’s the end of December, and we’re on the cusp of closing out 2018 and entering 2019.

I’ve often said in the past that it seems silly the notion of encapsulating things into calendar years, and having hope that things will miraculously be better the following year for no reason at all other than the fact that the last number in the date has ticked up one.  I say that, but I still find myself at the end of every year putting together these kinds of posts reflecting on a calendar year, and deciding whether it was good, whether it was bad, or more often than not, somewhere in the middle.

As far as two thousand and eighteen is concerned, I’m fairly confident that I can say with conviction that it was a pretty good year.  Not somewhere in the middle, but definitely up in the upper quartile of being good.  To those who kind of follow my life, the reasons for such are pretty obvious, but it kind of goes without saying that I’ve made some pretty big strides in my life in general, with none of them being larger than proposing to mythical gf, and making her mythical fiancée and soon-to-be future wifey.

I always figured there would be marriage in my life at some point, and it’s been an enjoyable albeit steady and deliberate ride, as that’s pretty much how I do most important things in my life, but I knew I was making the right choice moving forward, because as has been often times the case with the things in our relationship, things just felt right, and it was just time to make it more right, and move forward in our relationship to the next logical step.

Before I go any further reminiscing, getting engaged is what sets 2018 high atop years past, and by that logic, 2019 already has the groundwork laid down for it to be hopefully better. 

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Triumph to heartbreak; New Year’s Day 2018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After midnight struck bringing in 2018, I knew that my night wasn’t long from ending.  It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve actually been under the weather, and I knew that I didn’t really want to be out too late, since no matter how many pills I take, how much fluids I drink and how often I go tinkle, the penultimate cure-fast for any ailment is still sleep.

With mythical gf still out of town, I made it a point that I would not leave my house at all on New Year’s Day, and that I would sleep in, rest and do absolutely jack shit but watch football and relax.  I stocked up the fridge earlier in the day, and I even made a point to go spin a Pokéstop to satiate the OCD to get my daily Pokémon Go spin of the day on my way home, since it was past midnight and the daily bonuses had reset.  I took drowse-inducing cold medicine and went to bed with full intention to rest, recover, relax and be lazy.

As far as the day went, it wasn’t bad.  Dare I say, it was pretty good.  I probably slept close to ten total hours, and I woke up without any of the sinus/swallowing pain that is among the most obnoxious of cold symptoms.  I sat down with my morning cup(s) of coffee, and proceeded with my usual morning routine of Fire Emblem Heroes, knocking out the daily quests and cashing in on all of the little bonuses of the new month and new year, accumulating the precious orbs necessary in order to make pulls for additional characters.

So with 138 orbs grinded out and with a promotional event set to expire, I decided to cash in some orbs to try and get some of the character I wanted (Gunnthrá and New Year’s Azura).  And in a rare demonstration of actually succeeding in a gatcha game, I actually succeeded in getting both, along with two other five-star units I didn’t have (Eirika, Genny) without having to unload everything completely, leaving me with like 80 orbs for a rainy day.  Needless to say, I was quite satisfied at my luck, in only the way that a video game on a mobile device can make.

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The year in writing post, circa 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As is often times the case when it comes to life, 2017 had its ups and 2017 had its downs. As much as people bemoaned just how tragic and shitty 2016 was, I honestly cannot say that I personally felt that 2017 was tremendously better.  As I said, the year had its up and there were some most certainly good things that occurred during the last calendar year, but 2017 had no shortage of bad things that happened to people in general, people close to me, and people directly in my own life.

There may not have been as many notable celebrity deaths that have sent the internet abuzz with fake sympathy, bogus empathy and all the hollow fuck thoughts and prayers on the planet that were often the root of the angst towards 2016, but there was still no doubt that a lot of crappy things occurred regardless.  At least with death, it’s definitive and final, and the repercussions are only as impactful to mostly immediate families and occasional organizational legacies.  But take for example shit like the white supremacist uprising that plagued Charlottesville earlier in the year; this is very real, scary shit that’s easily hidden behind the façades of normal society, and can rise and hide on a moment’s notice.

Psychos who open fire on open-air concerts doesn’t change the frightfully abundant amounts of assault weaponry in the United States, and people still can’t stop arguing over conduct during the National Anthem and whether we have rights, or the rights to practice rights and other redundant arguments that just feed into the flames of people being miserable.

Frankly, given the direction that the world is headed, I couldn’t imagine death sounds like a terrible thing to more nihilistic types, dreading what the world is turning into as time passes.  I don’t imagine I’m the only one who thinks that society is most certainly not going in the right direction and that things probably are not going to be any better in five years, in line with that old Jimmy Carter speech.

But that’s a shitty thing for me to say, because death is most certainly no laughing matter, and the world has seen its share of it this year, as it does every single year.  Whether it’s numerous lives decimated by natural disasters like the hurricanes that ravaged Texas and Puerto Rico to the massacres by the hands of terrorists, domestic and foreign alike.  Or the casualties of the unfortunate hands that life deals out to unlucky people who are taken from the world by cancer or other indiscriminate ailments.

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The year’s end post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of the year, where people are under the belief that all the successes, failures, problems, issues, trends and stigmas can all be encapsulated into a box, taped shut, have the year written with a fat sharpie it, and jettisoned off into space, like a new star in Katamari Damacy.  If it were only as simple as that.

Yet, the fact that I write posts like this, at this time of the year, almost every year, proves that I’m really no different in the fact that I tend to write encapsulation posts, even though I don’t think bringing things to light will necessarily give me a nice clean slate at the start of the next calendar year.

But for what it’s worth, I can’t say that 2015 was the greatest of years, but it wasn’t necessarily the worst of years either.  No surprise there, letting the slider dangle back and forth, somewhere in the middle.  Obviously, I have a tendency to think that what I feel surely must be what others feel, even thought that can’t really be the case, but at least me personally, that’s the nature of life, there’s an ebb and flow between the good and bad; it’s just that I think 2015 was slightly more dangling in the bad side, but that’s not to say that there was no good in it at all.

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A resolution achieved, and then some

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, I tend to keep them to myself.  It’s like I have a superstitious belief or something, that’s basically like if I make my resolutions known to others, then it becomes less likely to succeed.  Sometimes I wonder if other people have that kind of mindset when it comes to resolutions, regardless of the fact that those who go with the tried and true “lose weight/save money” become kind of obvious in their behaviors, but for what it’s worth, I like to keep my resolutions somewhat private, for the sake of hoping they succeed.

That being said, with a day left in 2014, I figure it’s safe to pull the veil back just a little bit to my six readers, and let the cat out of the bag to what some of my resolutions were over this year, as well as the year prior.

This time last year, I made a short post with what I had striven to be a frustrated tone, because that’s precisely how I felt when I wrote it.  It was about how I had failed to achieve my one resolution in 2013, and how I was going to give it another go in 2014, but lower the criteria, lower the bar to the absolute lowest it could possibly get.  And that if I failed to achieve it in 2014, then I would have no choice but to make some dramatic changes in my life come 2015.

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