Tag: ohgeorgia

#TRYHARDSZN2024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Feels like it’s starting earlier than usual: two South Fulton teenagers accepted into 63 and 50 colleges respectively, trying really hard to not humble brag about it

It’s apparently already started, that time of year, in which throughout the country there are overachieving high school seniors who begin announcing, as loudly as they can on social media, just how many colleges they have been accepted to.  Some aim for the stars and only go for the cream of the crop like just the Ivy Leagues, and usually upper echelon schools like MIT, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, and then there are others who just apply for every school under the sun, as if there were no such thing as application fees.

And once the acceptances start rolling in, if the number is impressive enough, then onto the internets they go, boasting-not-boasting and humble bragging about how many schools they’ve been accepted into, with the hopes that some media outlet catches wind of it and puts any sort of spotlight onto them at all.

Of course, it can’t be ignored the dollar amounts of all these scholarships love to be extrapolated and added together, so that there can be somewhat of a tangible number to implement a degree of success and value of their accomplishments as a whole, and regardless of if and when they inevitably choose to go to whichever school is giving a full ride, no matter how lesser-heralded it may be, doesn’t change the fact that they put themselves into a position where they could brag about how many schools, simply said yes, you may attend our prestigious institution of higher education if you are willing to pay our egregious costs for credit hours, books, boarding and other bullshit expenditures.

But let’s get #TRYHARDSZN2024 off with a bang, with these two teens in my old stomping grounds of South Fulton county, which is the area’s PC way of lumping together the hood sections of the Southwestern region of the Metro Atlanta area.  But despite the fact that when watching the video in the article, there appears to be a whole legion of tryhards that have been accepted into 10-15+ colleges, these two particular teens who have hit 63 and 50 acceptances get the spotlight as being the biggest tryhards of the tryhards.

Sure, most of the schools that I was able to catch in the article are mostly smaller school, HBCUs, and schools nobody has really ever heard of, there were some notable Power-5 schools that have shown interest in them like Michigan State, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon and Mississippi State to name a few. 

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Georgia Snow Day 2024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Photo 100% unedited.  Yep, totally

The best part about not having to go into the office is that the day before, the entire state was going into winter snow storm protect mode.  Thanks to Snowpocalypse a decade ago, the entire state is, preferably, always on the side of caution and quick to pull the trigger when it comes to shutting down the city over thinking they can handle any modicum of snow, because as Snowpocalypse showed the world, Georgia is not.

Sure, it was chilly and the temperatures were rapidly falling, but with the chance of precipitation vanishing, I knew there was no real chance that we were going to get any snow.  Black guys ice, sure, was a possibility, but I didn’t think there was much chance that we were going to get any white blanketing over any parts of the state.  All the same, the Metro Atlanta area was quick to pull the trigger and shut down all of the schools, and my building was quick to declare a delayed opening, which honestly if there’s one drawback to the advent of remote work, is the fact that seldom can we ever be able to use snow days as an excuse anymore for not wanting to go into the office.

In the early morning, since I’m always the first person up in my house, I let the dog outside, and unsurprisingly, it was dark, dreary, cold and blustery, but not a single snowflake appeared to be floating around anywhere in sight.  As I prepared the kids’ breakfast and the sun began to creep up, it looked like a gray and dreary day, but definitely no snow in sight.

Despite the fact that my office had a report time of 10 am, I punted on the day, since I had started working remotely at like 8:45, and I wasn’t about to pack up my shit, drive to the office to set up shop again, and risk burning an hour of relocation and commute time when I had already started working.  And much like responsible people in the workforce, I probably ended up working longer and more studiously working from home that day, because my workload was quite slammed, and I was pretty much on the clock all the way up til 5 pm, without taking much of a lunch break because I was in such a groove.

But it was during one of these moments where I poked my head out to get some air, did I notice that not only was there no snow, it was absolutely, majestically peaceful, sunny and beautiful outside, albeit a frigid 16F degrees and windy as fuck.  So I had to snap the above picture to send to my friends to show them what snow in Georgia looks like.  It’s not my fault if the birds and wildlife decided to celebrate in front of my camera like the start of a Disney Animated Classic.

It’s been a while, how about building another sports property??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the span of the last decade or so, Georgia and primarily the Metro Atlanta area has seen a lot of sports-related projects be dropped onto us.  Spouting bullshit like economic impact, (minimum-wage) job creation and moar reasons for people to come visit _____ to feebly mask the reality that a bunch of old men are going to be getting rich on their investments while the taxpayers of each locale eat the brunt of the cost, we in Atlanta have witnessed such projects emerge or be proposed:

  • ScumTrust now Truist Park, the brand new home of the Atlanta Braves so that Braves fans could get away from all the scary black people in Downtown Atlanta
  • Mercedes-Benz Arena, the home of Atlanta United and the Atlanta Falcons because there was nothing wrong with the Georgia Dome other than the fact that it wasn’t designed to look like Megatron’s butthole and didn’t have an endorsement built into it
  • Atlanta United’s Training Grounds, because practicing and training at their brand new stadium is probably difficult because of all the traffic in Downtown
  • Gateway Center Arena, in Jurassic Ghetto College Park so that the Atlanta Hawks could have their developmental G-League squad have their very own stadium too
  • It was once proposed to build a Cricket Stadium out in Smyrna, coincidentally there is an extremely high concentration of Indians in the area, whom could probably actually justify its existence, but thankfully nothing really came from this
  • Out in Dawsonville, some developers want to build a Battery-like multi-purpose park, centered around a massive arena that would hope to lure an NHL team back to Atlanta in the event there are any more expansions in the future

So short of an NHL team that the city had already squandered, Atlanta’s pretty well represented in most major spectator sports, with the Braves, Hawks, Falcons and United, as well as minor league baseball and hockey smattered around the outskirts.  And they’ve all got their expensive little homes to mostly themselves; you’d think at this point, the city was actually full of sport venues/facilities, and couldn’t actually find any more means to build sport-related shit to bilk taxpayers, right?

LOL this post wouldn’t have come to fruition if the answer were actually yes.

So let’s congratulate Fayetteville, Georgia, for becoming the new and future home of the US Soccer National Training Center and the US Soccer Federation, and the latest victim member of Georgia’s club of regions to get more than likely fleeced by the building of something that the state had no need for in the first place.

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This is oddly validating

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

We’re #1!  Or #50:  Georgia ranks first (or last) in happiness of employees, according to rando website, then reported by WSB

Considering the fact that I have very specific brog tags for “ohatlanta” and “ohgeorgia” I’ve been critical of my home state since basically, I moved here.  It did not take too long for me to recognize bullshit when I saw it, combined with the age in which I moved here, really growing up into bullshit recognition and as my generation is often liked to be labeled, as woke, there is an odd sense of ironic satisfaction at seeing Georgia win, or tank at employee happiness. 

It validates a lot of criticisms I’ve had and witnessed throughout my life living here, and there’s a part of me that likes to pawn off my own struggles with depression as having reason on account of working.

But back to the data aggregation itself, the rankings were based on criteria such as quit rates, commute times, working hours, injuries, paid time off and state positivity levels.  Considering the fact that Georgia has turned into a battleground state politically, it obviously has a very high rate of contention in general state happiness, as at any given point, nearly half the state is pissed about the color of it.  But if I had to guess what is really anchoring down the state’s general workforce happiness, has got to be the commute times, in which is further anchored down probably by Atlanta itself.

According to GPS, I’m barely six miles from my office, but I still need to give myself an entire half hour in order to traverse home to work, and I don’t actually have to touch a highway either.  I’m usually below the median commute time of 28.7 minutes according to this study, but barely, and any little divot such as a fender bender or some rando school bus being late easily pushes me past it.

And to think there were varying times in my life where I had commutes of 70+ minutes and 55 miles each way, and I was living my life then, I couldn’t imagine going back to such hellacious commuting conditions ever again.

But again, I’m just going to assume most of Georgia’s ranking is weighted heavily by Atlanta since lets face it, outside of pockets of civilization in Augusta, Macon and Savannah, there ain’t shit else in Georgia that could muddy up the picture of the state, and even those pockets are merely blips of population compared to the five million-plus that live in the Metro Atlanta area.  And most are innately aware of the escalating cost of living in the Metro Atlanta area, with obviously the wages not rising commensurate to meet them, which would of course lead to a lot of unhappiness.  I’m sure this is nothing different than lots of other major cities across the nation, but based on this study, it’s very apparent in Georgia, more so than everywhere else. 

Honestly though, when I came across this article, I thought I’d have way more to say about it than I apparently do, but continuing this post any further would just be parroting things already said.  Georgia is apparently full of a bunch of unhappy people in the workforce, and although I don’t necessarily think I’m one of them, I’m definitely not really in the happy camp on a daily basis, but I don’t think a lot of these correlating conditions really help either.  I know my general sense of happiness wouldn’t mind some extra wage to help alleviate a lot of my anxieties and issues.

Rarely are there ever winners in college football

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay, so I’ve been marinating over this topic over the last few days.  The 2023-2024 college football playoff field is set, and unsurprisingly there exists a ton of salt from various fanbases, just as much pointless analysis to simulate a bunch of hypotheticals, and then a whole lot more salt from the results of such hypothetical matchups.  Honestly, this isn’t something that I was really intending on writing about, but it’s getting a little slow at the office as we’ve entered the tail end of the year and the holiday season, and I’ve found a little bit of time here and there to help kill time by writing, win-win.

Honestly, I think the committee did an okay job with the four teams that are slated to play for the National Championship.  The only one I really don’t agree with is Texas, but I’m completely okay with Michigan, Washington and Alabama being in the playoff.  I wholeheartedly agree that Florida State, in spite of their 13-0 record and ACC championship aren’t a top-4 team, because the ACC has been more or less anything but a Power-5 conference since well, Trevor Lawrence left Clemson.

Trying to not sound like such a Georgia homer, but despite the fact that they did lose the SEC to Alabama, I still feel that they should’ve been in the playoff, especially instead of Texas.  CFB is always about recency bias above all else, and Georgia did finally lose, at the worst possible time ever, but nobody’s going to convince me that the two-time defending National Champions who hadn’t lost in two years doesn’t deserve to be in the CFB playoff.

An even harder sell is convincing me, as well as millions of other CFB fans, that a Michigan/Washington/Georgia/Alabama field wouldn’t be absolute money for all parties involved, because it’s no secret that the SEC has flexed on the entire sport for decades at this point, and what better way for other conferences to try to overcome the mountain than by having two SEC powerhouses in the field?

If anything, the one flexible school that is in the field in my opinion is Washington, because they’re always a strong regular season school, but have done jack shit come postseason, with them getting trounced by Alabama just a few years ago the time they did make it in.  Plus they have a far smaller fanbase that isn’t nearly as willing to spend money, travel, spend money or spend money than programs such as FSU, Texas or Ohio State, and as long as the CFB playoff remains a biased invitational, there will always remain arguments of keeping certain programs out for the pursuit of money.

Regardless of my armchair analysis, the one thing that most everyone can agree upon at this juncture is that the CFB playoff field desperately, desperately needs expansion.  Fortunately, this is something that is mutually agreed upon by the CFB committee, but unfortunately this is not the year in which it rolls out, otherwise we’d have a pretty lit playoff field set.

But the word is that starting next season, the playoff will become a 12-team field with the top four seeds all getting bye weeks, and then 5-12 playing games to reduce to eight, then to four, before setting up the game for the Natty.  And although this system is probably more than sufficient to get a lot of CFB fans wet, sure there is a lot for me to like as well, but I just think that it isn’t a particularly good idea as well.

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Welp, I guess all of ‘Murica is just one giant FOOD SWAMP

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I remembered when I first heard of the phrase “food desert” it entertained me a great deal because whomever coined the phrase really tried to compare blighted, impoverished areas to like, the Mojave or Sahara deserts, gigantic wastelands of sand and heat.  And it immediately brought to my mind a desert in an early Final Fantasy title and of course I made a post about it back then, complete with the corresponding Final Fantasy screen grab.

But basically, food deserts were communities that were statistically past a certain distance threshold to the nearest grocery store or market where fresh produce and other perishable goods could be purchased, as well as just food in general.  And being so far from such then makes them the equivalent to floundering in the desert without edible resources.

In other words, it was basically used to describe rural areas or ghettos, where grocery stores don’t want to build in, because there’s not nearly as much money to be made there, regardless of the demographics of those areas that are conveniently zeroed in on as reasons for such invention of terminology.

Anyway, just today I learned that a new term was invented at some point: food swamp.

Kind of along the same base as a food desert, but except that in spite of the difficulty in being able to procure fresh produce and perishable goods, they have an abundance of options when it comes to fast food, prepackaged garbage food and other unhealthy options.

The irony is that food swamps can be used to describe, basically the same conditions that make a food desert a food desert: remote areas and/or ghettos that have the access issues when it comes to being able to get fresh, healthy foods, but in a lot of cases, they’re areas where there’s also an abundance of shitty fast food options.

So despite the fact that new terminology has been invented, the places that they describe seem to have a tremendous overlap.  Funny how things work out like that.

But more importantly, it allows me to once again use old school Final Fantasy screen caps, to best describe the words being used, and like the subject of the post says, given the criteria of what makes a food swamp a food swamp, I guess it really could be said that pretty much most of ‘Murica, is just one giant fucking food swamp after all.

Welp, we’re screwed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Better update my will: relative to the giant Asian murder-death-kill hornet discovered in Georgia

I like how the news is trying to low-key downplay the nightmare scenario we’re about to embark on by saying that it’s just the relative to the Asian genocide hornet, the yellow-legged hornet.  It’s kind of like saying Hitler’s brother who also hates Jews has shown up, but it’s okay because it’s not Adolf. 

Make no mistake, if the yellow-legged hornets have already made it to Georgia, it’s either a matter of time, or they haven’t yet been sighted, that the actual Nazi Axis of Evil hornets are going to be here eventually.  Like the old African killer bees, or even COVID for that matter, in the world we live in, once something becomes a problem in one place, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a problem globally.

“The plan will begin with trapping, and APHIS and GDA will set out traps and survey for this pest to determine if additional yellow-legged hornets are in the area,” a release said. “If a colony is discovered through reporting, trapping, or tracking, the colony will be eradicated.

Begin with trapping?  How about begin with eradicating?  I know science is all about exploration and learning, but we’re dealing with a species of bug that is related to legitimate murderers that can dissolve human flesh with their stings.  We’re talking about like, poison frog darts that can think on their own, fly, strategize, organize and dominate, and we’ve got fucking scientists wanting to study this bullshit?  Oh no, not the smartest move here, that’s some Netflix Resident Evil Jade Wesker-level dumbass decision making.

Like why wait until a colony is discovered before deciding to pull some fucking triggers?  Fuck up the hornets on an individual basis, and hope that if their cohorts are around, they saw what happened, and report back to the colony that rednecks in Georgia are not to be fucked around with.  And then email or text their big ass cousins and tell them to stay away from America lest they get fucked up too, and hope it does its job at deterring the actual Hitler hornets from coming stateside; if they already aren’t here yet.

Which I’m pretty sure they are, because I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, and it sounds like actual BMF hornets have been found in the Pacific-Northwest, which means after they colonize in some bag of Sumatran coffee beans in the Starbucks factory, they’re a FedEx plane from being shipped all over the country so they can begin their domination of the West, before polishing off the rest of the world.

All the same, looks like we’re all fooked boys and girls.