Tag: nostalgia

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 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.

Dad Brog (#173): I wonder where she gets it from

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is the baby on board tag I put on my car from even before #1 had even arrived.  I had just installed my first ever car seat into the car, and I was completely gung-ho about diving head-first into dad mode, and this tag went up onto the back hatch windshield shortly thereafter. 

A little after a year later, when I switched to a larger dadmobile after #2 arrived, the tag was one of the first things that went up into the new ride.

The sun has clearly faded it, and it has fallen off countless times throughout the years, but I’ve always put it back up, even as my kids went from babies to infants to toddlers to the little opinionated shits they can be today.  At ages six and five, they are far from being babies, in spite of the fact that I always remind them that they’ll always be my babies, no matter when they’re 26, 38 or 45.

The latest fall off, the tag sat off the window for a little while, unnoticed, until it somehow managed to come into the house, stuck to a something that was being brought inside.  I looked at it on the kitchen counter, and feeling a melancholy, bittersweet wave of nostalgia, decided that perhaps it was time to finally say goodbye to the tag, since my kids are far removed from being actual babies anymore.

#1 then looks at the tag and wistfully says I shouldn’t get rid of it, and that it should go back up into the car, just for old time’s sake. 

Kid is six, she hasn’t been alive long enough for things to be old enough for old time’s sake.

But it was amusing to me that she’s clearly got this sense of nostalgia and tendency to attach emotion to completely useless inanimate objects, and it’s clear where she gets it from.  And I fear for her future, because I think it’s inevitable that she’s going to develop some hoarding tendencies and have a home full of completely useless crap, because her dad fights such on a regular basis and her mom is incapable of throwing anything away, and my dad was bordering on being on Hoarders: Buried Alive based on the monumental amount of well-organized bullshit that I had to clean up from house earlier in the year.

The tag is still sitting on the kitchen counter, pending a decision, and because nobody in my household is capable of not putting all their crap on the counter or table and letting it accumulate and stack like precarious Tetris stacks.  In a few days, if I’m feeling aggravated, it will end up in the trash, victim of rage cleaning at wanting to feel some semblance of order and cleanliness in my life, and I know that this is the inevitable fate of the tag, so I don’t really know why I don’t just bite the bullet and pull the trigger.

Except that I do know the answer to why, and that’s why it will be allowed to remain there until the lesser emotion does its natural order, and it’s pretty obvious where my eldest gets it from.

Dad Brog (#172): The Lego difficulty spike is real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Growing up, among my favorite toys were Legos.  Frankly, that fandom hasn’t changed, considering the small collection of nostalgia Lego sets that I’ve purchased within the last few years that I’ll never actually put together but protect with fervor at the thought of not having them because it’s better to have and not need than to want and not be able to get and maybe one day when I have a nice big room of dedicated me-space, I’ll be able to set up a table and actually put these sets together but anyway.

Much to my delight, my children have grown to like Legos in their own right, and over the last two years or so, we’ve been occasionally putting Lego sets together and they get decent entertainment out of both the building as well as playing with the finished products.  Sure, they’re expensive as F these days as the cost of official Lego products have inflated as much as petroleum throughout the passage of time, and it is interesting to see the alternate yet compatible brands that are out there now, much as Tyco were the off-brand of my childhood that got mixed into the brick piles, but Mega Bloks and some cheap bootlegs from Daiso have been good ways to subsidize entertaining my children, and once disassembled, nobody has any clue and for the remainder of this post I will continue to refer to all bricks as simply Legos, much like the term for sodas have a generalized term.

Over the last few Lego projects with my kids, there’s always a finite amount of time in which the kids’ focus wavers and eventually breaks, and lately it’s typically gone from, let’s build together with dad to, distractions from the other kid making it hard to focus on continuing, to ultimately zero participation with dad is it finished yet?

What doesn’t help is the seemingly massive difficulty spike in build complexity with today’s general Lego sets, and it doesn’t seem nearly as basic as my own childhood, going from Duplos into set #6954 Blacktron: Renegade although perhaps that’s a bad example but I wanted to make that nostalgic deep cut.  But the point remains that there’s a pretty wide difficulty curve in Legos in general that seems to be a stark contrast to the gradual increase in builds from when I was growing up.

Like, in my elder child’s room, she has two bins full of Duplo blocks, and on almost a daily basis, she builds the most expansive castles and structures that she, and I are so proud of her imagination skills at creating such things.  But come downstairs, and we’ve got all the Lego kits we’ve been amassing over the last two years, and regardless of the suggested age written on each box, I just figure it’s more important to get them based on the concepts and properties that the kids like, seeing as how their dad is an adult Lego enthusiast with decades of experience putting these things together.

Except the thing is, and which is probably the chief reason why Legos are harder now than they were when I was a kid, is the fact that just about every Lego kit now has 400% more small and intricate pieces than the kits I grew up with.  I don’t know what terminology the  Lego community uses to describe Legos today, but for lack of a better term, the amount of pieces that are sized beneath 2×4 and even 2×2 peg pieces AKA a whole shitload of tiny pieces, is tremendous; creating scenarios where they get lost, easy to miss,* resulting in an increased probability of build failure.

*and easy to end up stepping on, which many know that nothing is a greater pain in the galaxy than barefoot stepping on Lego bricks

Furthermore, as impressively creative as lots of today’s Lego builds are nowadays, many end up with suspect connection points, weak joints and integrity ill-suited for elementary school aged kids who want to play and imagine and simulate, instead of dorky adult builders who want to build and display and not actually play with them.

All this being said, my kids and I will put together various Lego kits, only for them to be played with for 5-10 minutes, immediately forgotten until a corresponding kit is created, added to the world of completed kits, and maybe another 5-10 minutes of play is created.

In between play time, small components break off, go missing, mixed together, and it becomes impossible to put things back together.  Thankfully, I have the experienced wherewithal to not toss any instruction booklets in the rare event anyone actually wants to reassemble anything, but as we get more sets, and more sets get built and fall apart, inevitably things get to the point where they have to be fully disassembled, and all bricks get put into the dreaded Lego Bin, where everything is tossed into a communal tub in the name of space conservation.

And it was in the latest episode of dad waits until the kids are in bed to start breaking down idle and incomplete and broken up kits and putting them into The Lego Bin did I really realize just how intricate and full of small tiny pieces that today’s kits all seem to be comprised of, and how I feel like this really impacts the overall replay-ability of Legos in general, with kids probably favoring to get brand new kits instead of playing with communal piles of micro-parts, and writing that out, perhaps that’s the goal of Lego corporate to begin which makes those cocksuckers evil geniuses.

Either way, I’m glad my kids like building with Legos, but the shade of adulthood continues to look at things from my childhood in their modern incarnations with skepticism of accusatory greed and intentions to bilk consumers before providing a source of entertainment and happiness.

Plus I’m just getting tired of stepping on all these goddamn bricks, which isn’t so much Lego’s fault for scattering them on my floors, but at the same time it is, that they keep making sets that have nothing but 1×1 and 2×1 micro-bricks that are real easy for young children to misplace and end up scattered.

Watching the WWE has kind of become a job

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was on vacation, I didn’t really think much of wrestling beyond the show in Korea that I was going to go/had gone to, and thinking of an upcoming local show that I mentally reminded myself to reach out to my boys about when I got back.  But as far as what was going on in the big pro-wrestling industry, I knew that I was missing out on things, but at the same time I didn’t really care.

Through social media, I saw that Sami Zayn had won the WWE championship at Night of Champions, which in one hand made me happy because I’ve grown to really appreciate the man and his career, and it always brings me satisfaction when a hard worker gets rewarded. 

However, in the other hand, was the skepticism that his win came entirely on account of the fact that this was one of the WWE’s gross Saudi shows, and in spite of the fact that the E has gotten a lot of credit in recent years for not treating viewers like complete idiots like they used to, such doesn’t seem to apply to the Saudi shows and the company pretty much does nothing but grasp at low-hanging fruit out in the Middle East.  It’s very easy to assume that Sami won in Saudi Arabia almost entirely to satiate the local audience, getting to see an openly Muslim man win the largest prize in the company.

Such narrative was justified just nine days later, when Sami would immediately drop the WWE championship to a returning CM Punk; contrary to what I was just saying about not treating fans like idiots, such had occurred in Chicago, Punk’s hometown, being seen as yet another low-hanging fruit cash grab, or that Sami was seen as nothing more than a transitional champion and that this was the plan all along, neither of which is particularly good optics among the IWC.

The E has been harder and harder to keep up with, much less actually, like and enjoy, as the sands of time have progressed since the company had been sold, folded into the parent TKO company, and turned into this NASCAR-like ATM of corporate greed.

Months ago, I stated that I’d never felt more alienated from the WWE and my general fandom, and not only has that not changed, but the chasm has widened and continues to do so.

Obviously, companies like the WWE and their parents TKO don’t become the bloated fat cash cows they are because they care about lifer fans with lots of opinions like me, but if it actually mattered, they’re at constant risk of fans like me turning my back on them because of how much they’ve changed things, primarily for the pursuit of moar and moar money.

The point of all this is that I’d actually been debating with myself since coming back from vacation, on if it really wanted to bother getting back into watching big wrestling anymore, because over the last few months, watching wrestling has begun to feel more like a chore and that my time was not being spent well doing such, versus actually enjoying the product. 

For every Iyo Sky vs. Rhea Ripley or El Grande Americano vs. El Grande Americano banger classic, there are hours upon hours of ads to have to sit through, predictable, ChatGPT-generated storylines, moar ads, moar shitty product, and a whole lot more ads.

But for lack of a better alternative, as well as probably false-hope clinging that just one more RAW will get better, I still tuned into RAW the other night, just to see where things were.  And honestly, nothing was really new, and I’m left wondering why I even bother, yet again.  I’d say I’ll just keep up through YouTube, but even those videos are so loaded with ads now as well, that they’re becoming a chore as well.

I was chatting with some of my bros during the broadcast, and it dawned on me that watching the WWE was a lot more like a job, than the last time I opined such, and it was slightly more explainable now, because as someone who has worked for large corporations for the most of their career, watching WWE truly feels like a scenario where I like and appreciate all the workers and talent, but I really dislike and detest all of the higher-ups, shareholders and people who are steering the workers and talent into soul-sucking and inefficient uses of their skillsets.

Frankly I realize that I’ve had this mentality and relationship with other fandoms in my life, like how I’ve felt/currently feel about the Atlanta Braves, as well as how I’ve felt about most of the companies I’ve ever worked for.  I appreciate (most) talent, workers and colleagues, but I don’t particularly care much for those higher up, playing a different game than the rest of the pleebs.

This is probably one of those revelations where I’m amazed to realize at the age of 44, and that there are probably tons of people way more enlightened than me that figured it out way longer ago.  That fandoms all eventually feel like jobs at times, and that it’s worth pondering on if they’re worth continuing to keep once they hit that point, or if we should always just be looking for better things to invest our time into.

As far as professional wrestling goes, I still enjoy going to indy shows with friends, and thankfully Atlanta has no shortage of availability of such shows, and even though I’m jaded and completely skeptical of the E these days, I still have hopes for the few storylines that it’s clear that the company actually gives a shit about, like the masterpiece that is the redemption of Chad Gable. 

Granted, I know that on a long enough timeline, they’ll fuck it up because they always fuck up eventually, be it through he’ll fall short at Summer Slam due to some shenanigans, an injury, or they won’t plan for anything beyond his initial journey and that he peters out after victory, but at least for the time being, he’s probably the best thing going under the E umbrella, and the only thing I’m truly vested in with the company.

Seoul Searching, circa 2026

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel like there’s got to be an industry for creating end-of-vacation travel packages that help mitigate the downward emotional connotation of a conclusion to a trip.  Not sure how it would entirely entail, but stuff like low-stress return travel, not having to do death marches at inconvenient times, and any methods of help reduce the strain of time changes and logistics.

Of course, this is a hypothetical thought that comes to mind while mythical wife and I are en route home after two weeks without kids, as we’ve traversed through Seoul, Singapore, the ambiguous open seas somewhere between Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and wherever else, before a crash course through Hong Kong, and on our way back to ‘Murica, while trying to fight the feelings of dread of returning to normal life although we’re both looking forward to seeing the girls again.

This was, for all intents and purposes, the first true adults-only vacation that we’ve been on, since, our honeymoon, due to the unintentional expediency in which our kids came into the picture, as well as a fucking pandemic.  Not necessarily by design, during the course of our trip, a lot of shit happened, noteworthy to me, like the Knicks winning the NBA championship while we were in the air, missing ALL of the World Cup group stage, while trying to catch some action while hilariously on the other side of the planet, Father’s Day, and our anniversary, where we entered year 8 of marriage dear god where has the time gone

But, in true autist fashion, of course I jotted down notes and blurbs of things and thoughts that came to mind during travels because of course it’s got to become shit for me to write about in the brog that nobody reads except for me.

The last time I was in Korea was nine years ago, when I came with mythical wife on what was her first-ever visit to the Motherland. She has since been back a few times without me because she hates traveling with me, but I was excited to return because it has been quite some time since I’d been.

I didn’t think that much would be different since my last visit, but I suppose it was naive of me to think that, because it was almost culture shock to count all the ways things had changed since my last time out here.  If I had to try to nail the reasons, I would say that it’s probably a combination of boy band BTS going globally mainstream, K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the general mass popularization of Korean culture on a global scale, because for the most part, Seoul was absolutely crawling with foreign tourists.

Naturally, this is me saying that it was at times, uncomfortably and inconveniently crowded at times, and I’d be lying if I didn’t think to myself thoughts about how Thanos Was Right and other nihilistic things that stem from my general aversion to crowds.

Continue reading “Seoul Searching, circa 2026” →

The Knicks winning is my 12-year old self’s dream come true

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I knew that I was vested in the Knicks when I stopped watching or following the games, because that’s what I do when I want a team to win.  I don’t watch, because my presence will obviously cause whatever team I want to win, to lose.

I was on an airplane, en route to Seattle for a night before getting on a longer flight to Seoul, when mythical wife turned on game 5 on the in-flight live television. We had just watched two World Cup matches of wildly different skill levels, and we still had an hour before we landed, and despite her being aware of my superstitious beliefs, turned it on anyway, because I like to believe that as a former New Yorker, she felt some modicum of support to the Knicks and wanted them to win as I did.

There was 1:26 left and then Knicks held a slim lead, and I’ve been in this position enough times to know that me tuning in would be akin to the kiss of death, that the Spurs, probably Victor Wembanyama was going to hit some crazy impossible three-pointer to take the lead, survive game 5, and propel them to overcoming the 3-1 series lead and win the NBA Finals.

But such did not happen.  As has been the case since really, the last two years or so, this Jalen Brunson-led squad bent a little bit, but did not break.  Defenses did their job, rebounds were corralled, and they’d get to the free throw line, and convert just enough to keep them mathematically out of the realm of a game-losing shot.

The last 29 seconds of the game predictably lasted about 29 minutes as both teams leveraged their remaining time outs, and strategized their foul usage to attempt to manipulate the win probability charts as best as they could.

But the New York Knicks held, they did not yield and break, and for the first time in 53 years, won the NBA championship.  Bringing ultimate basketball glory to a franchise and city that has been starving for one for a literal lifetime.

This championship is for the city of New York, which I normally don’t hold a tremendous amount of regard for, but can understand decades and generations of basketball fans who have been hoping to see a Knicks championship, same as I did for a period of my time.

True story and not just because it’s convenient to rehash this narrative because they just won the ship: when I was a kid, I was a gigantic New York Knicks fan. I’m not entirely sure how it even started, perhaps it was the contrarian in me that really wanted to see Michael Jordan lose in the 93 playoffs, and was ignited by John Starks’ The Dunk on Horace Grant and MJ, but for better or worse, I can earnestly say that my first favorite basketball team was the Knicks.

Tough choice of when to declare my fandom, seeing as how the Knicks would squander their 2-0 lead against the Bulls, but such would kind of set the tone for my journey with them.

Continue reading “The Knicks winning is my 12-year old self’s dream come true” →