Tag: triggered

Batman: Caped Crusader – tf did Alfred do to deserve all this disrespect?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to mediums outside of comic books, it’s no secret that DC Comics has struggled bringing to life most of their property, regardless of how iconic, how much potential and how much of a layup it really should seem.  Fortunately, James Gunn and John Cena seem to be on what I think is a positive direction with a potentially entertaining DC Cinematic Universe akin to what Marvel has accomplished, and I love the idea that Peacemaker, that John fucking Cena seems to be the lynch pin that could be the basis for it all, much like Robert Downey, Jr. did as Iron Man for the MCU.

Animation, has clearly been the strong suit for DC, and they’ve done a pretty good job of bringing stories to life in animated form throughout the years.  The whole saga starting with the Flashpoint Paradox was pretty enjoyable, and of course, a lifelong top-10 possibly top-5 show for me was and always will be, Batman the Animated Series.

It seems kind of surprising that it took nearly two decades for a proper spiritual successor to Batman TAS to come out, but then again, TAS holds up so well that it really didn’t need any successor, but all the same, Batman: Caped Crusader on Amazon Prime has been doing an adequate job of spiritually succeeding TAS, as far as I’m concerned.  It doesn’t hurt that Bruce Timm is back in the driver’s seat, along with JJ Abrams, one of the lord of the nerds who has a knack for breathing love into projects that many might think would be too lofty of endeavors.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that it’s remotely close to bettering TAS, but it has still been a refreshing watch, and at the time I’m writing this, I’m over halfway through S2, but felt a compulsion to write about it now and often times I have to strike when the iron is hot, but it’s been good.  I don’t think S2 has been as good as the first season was, but I imagine it will conclude with a massive upshot, considering what the show has obviously been doing throughout the season.

But it has done a good job of partially recapturing the magic of TAS, no doubt due to the completely lifted character design and complete auditory homage to the original, but they gain a little distance by going a little further back in the Batman timeline, as well as taking a much more adult theme, clearly intending this show to be nowhere near the after-school FOX Kids lineup or anything like it.

Batman is undoubtedly nerfed, seeing as how he’s earlier in his crime-fighting career, and definitely takes his share of getting damaged, but most of the differences are very heavy handed throughout this universe, primarily with the mass re-imagination of just about everyone from the series, in various ways.

Jim and Barbara Gordon are now black, Harleen Quinzel appears to be possibly Asian in appearance, Selina Kyle is now raven-haired, the Riddler has been made to be more of a bruising gunman, and the Mad Hatter is now a woman.  Renee Montoya is getting a ton more screen time now, but she’s also been made to be kind of fridge build Latina.  Harley’s also been thicc’ened up, deviating from her lithe petite pixie stature of TAS.

I can imagine that there’s a lot of discriminative takes on the massive wave of changes in CC from those who were passionate about TAS, or just traditional source material.  I notice all the differences, but when the day is over, I really couldn’t care about a lot of the characteristic swaps made throughout the cast, except for one: Alfred Pennyworth.

For some reason, Caped Crusader has decided to make Alfred fat, and look more like “Mean Gene” Okerlund than most traditional variations of Alfred, who is usually of a medium-to-lean, unsuspecting build, which is perfect considering the history of the character was that he was basically an MI5 espionage spy in his younger, active days.

Why CC decided to make him fat is completely beyond me, and one of the few things about the show that I really can’t stand by, and get triggered every time I see him. 

To make matters worse, the show has made the younger Bruce Wayne more of an asshole, pretending way too hard to be a pretentious womanizing socialite billionaire playboy when he’s in his alter ego, but the behavior doesn’t seem to end when he’s back under the mask.  Primarily the fact that he only refers to Alfred as “Pennyworth” like he were the senior jock quarterback of the school while Alfred were some sniveling maggot freshman, lucky enough to be in the stratosphere of Bruce Wayne.

The severe disrespect for Alfred Pennyworth throughout the series is the only true serious beef I have with Caped Crusader.  It’s otherwise a very good show, and an adequate successor to TAS, but it annoys the piss out of me whenever Alfred is disrespected so flagrantly.  Seeing as how I haven’t finished S2 yet, I hope this course corrects at some point, and we get back to an Alfred getting a modicum of the respect that he is deserving of.

When everyone has a hundo, nobody does

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I do play a little bit pretty much every single day, I actually don’t have a whole lot of knowledge of what’s going on in Pokémon Go.  I don’t read the patch notes, updates, or even pay much attention to whenever Professor Willow shoehorns himself onto the screen to tell me of some missions that are afoot.  I just play a little bit every day, try and do daily research, attempt to complete as many of the weekly tasks as I can, hatch eggs, and make some modicum of progress in levels.

To what end, I have no idea, and typing this all out, I kind of realize just how fruitless my ambition in the game really is.  It’s just something that I’ve done for probably 99% of the time since the game launched a decade ago, and OCD me has just stuck with it.  I like to think that I want to get shinies and hundos and shiny hundos, and to have an impressive Pokédex of rares and strong quality Pikachus, but when the day is over, there really is no goal in place for me.

All the same, recently the game has been celebrating its actual 10-year anniversary, and despite the fact that I don’t pay much attention to the happenings of the game, one of the things I can say that that I wager not as many people as they might think can claim is that fact that I have regularly played since the debut of the game, and although my level and accomplishments in the game might not reflect it, it is true.

One of the major things the game has decided to do in honor of the decade-long survival of a mobile game, is that to all players, they have an ultra-super low-hanging fruit mission to where the prizes for completion are a Master Ball, as well as a guaranteed encounter with a MewTwo.  Over social media, it became apparent that this specific MewTwo encounter was a guaranteed hundo (perfect stats), and as is the case with MewTwo encounters, there is a decent chance that one could get a shiny.

Many have flexed screen grabs of their shiny hundo MewTwos; my own was not shiny, but that’s fine because I already have a shiny, albeit it is not a hundo, but I can be content with the fact that I now have a hundo MewTwo in my Pokédex, even if it is basically a free giveaway.

But unsurprising, there has been a faction of Pikachu Game players who have opined their general disappointment and low-key bitterness that the game has basically taken the prestige and distinction of having MewTwos of any quality, by basically giving everyone one, pretty much for free.

I get that sentiment; when the game initially released MewTwo, in extremely difficult raids, with extremely difficult catch rates, if you could be lucky enough to participate in the raid much less succeed in the first place, I went out of my way to join communities, find out where other players were gathering, and got my ass out of the house in order to try and catch them.  I was determined to complete my Kanto collection 100%, which was possible for me seeing as how I had actually traveled to places like Asia and Europe and gotten region-specific Pikachus like Farfetch’d and Mr. Mime, and now MewTwo was the last one to round out Kanto.

I remember how accomplished I felt when I finally got my first one, and how I declared myself a true lord of Kanto.  But then the itch of the Three PS3s guy kind of creeped into my brain, and I began to ask myself why stop with just one MewTwo, when I could have three?  It was a little bit of a grind, but I got my third MewTwo, but then it kept going, and going, and at the time I’m writing this, I have 22 MewTwos, which isn’t bad for someone who doesn’t live in like New York City or Seoul or any other high-density location where there are always 6 Pokéstops and gyms every square mile, where taking down the strongest of gyms is easy with high bases of players.

Needless to say, it is kind of a crappy feeling to know how many people are getting basically a free hundo MewTwo now just for participating, when it was so difficult to get them back when they first emerged.  It cheapens the rarity and sense of accomplishment of getting them in the past for the old heads like me who have been in the trenches of daily playing for the better part of the last decade, and I can understand the salt from players like us.

Naturally, there are contrarians to the detractors, and I’ve seen commenters on social media throwing up all sorts of analogies and straw man metaphors to try and shit on the people who shit on the event which just leads to the shitty wasteland that is a social media arena, and I’ve smartly decided to stay out of public discussion because I know I’d just get piled on for my opinions and I don’t need that, and I have a brog that nobody reads where I can air out my thoughts without any concern of rebuttal.

People complaining about free stuff, rich people complaining about too much butter on their lobsters, but the one that piqued my interest were those accusing the haters that they probably hated when the government paid off student loan debts.  I get the analogy, and see the similarities between people who have responsibly paid their student loan debts off getting salty over thousands of people suddenly getting them absolved, but at the same time it’s laughable that someone would even make the analogy of student loan debt versus Pokémon Go.

Student loan debt is a legitimate problem in the world, and there are very real-world consequences for those who have struggled on account of them.  Pokémon Go is a fucking phone game, and nobody at all has endured any sort of legitimate struggle on account of it.  But from a semantics standpoint, yes it is similar; tenured lifers who have put in their 10,000+ hours suddenly getting to see filthy casuals get to reap similar rewards with a fraction of the effort, it does make sense.

The thing is, this isn’t even the first time that Niantic has pulled this shit of lowering the bar and giving tons of shit away for free in order to boost engagement, downloads and player participation.  A few years ago when I went to Korea, I was psyched to be able to catch a Farfetch’d, and I went kind of out of my way to get one, and I felt so proud when I did.  But literally that same trip, Niantic dropped this event where players could briefly get regional Pikachus from other regions, meaning those in the west were able to get Farfetch’d, Mr. Mime went to the Oceanic, Tauros went to Europe, and Kangaskhan came to Asia.

It’s hypocritical for me to have felt a similar salt since thanks to that event I was able to get Kangaskhan without having to go to Australia/NZ, but I did admittedly feel salt that Americans were able to get Farfetch’d without having to be in Asia, like I was at that very time.  They didn’t earn it, and I did feel annoyance when I’d see like Facebook friends who I know long abandoned the game, who were posting about how they’d logged in for the first time in. years just to get it, and smugly proclaim how they intended to hibernate immediately afterward.

But at the end of the day, it’s still just Pokémon Go.  In two weeks, everyone will have forgotten about this whole thing, and as time passes, everyone’s hundo MewTwos won’t mean shit, especially if like 70% of them will be in accounts that will just go dormant for months to years.  But it’s still interesting to see the whole shitshow of Niantic dropping an event, and the inevitable clash between the lifers, versus all of the filthy casuals who pop in and feel as entitled and deserving to the same benefits that those who have actually put in the work to get beforehand already have.

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.

Flock camera haters wouldn’t last 4 seconds in Korea

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks and months, I’ve been hearing about Flock cameras and how there are a lot of people who seem to be vehemently opposed to their existence.  Not only have haters been vandalizing, sabotaging and outright destroying them – FOR ‘MURICA, apparently there’s been a lot of controversy over police using the tech on the backend for less-than-ethical means, leading to a surprising amount of discipline towards a group of individuals who have been seemingly immune to the consequences of oversight over the years.

As far as punishing the po-po who have been supposedly abusing their access to Flock camera information, a lot of context is missing, and very little details ever seem to be given in regards to what curious cops are doing with Flock camera data, although it must be pretty substantial for them to actually be receiving disciplinary action, considering all manner of abuses of power, such as driving like shitheads and killing minorities tend to get swept under the rug, but god forbid these guys access surveillance without proper authorization, so I only have so much opinion on them, although I can’t imagine it would improve if we the people were actually given any further information.

But regular people, the Joe-Schmoes of the world who are getting so bent out of shape over the presence of Flock cameras, this kind of fascinates me.  In one hand, I get that it does kind of suck to know that there is an increase of Big Brother-ing by, for lack of a better term, the government, that frankly nobody asked for, and people, especially ‘Muricans, generally don’t respond well to the idea of being surveilled.  But in the other hand, my general take on surveillance is that, if you’re not doing anything sketchy or illicit, what does it matter if you are being potentially monitored?

It’s not like Flock cameras are sprouting like mushrooms and fungus during the summer humidity, from what I can observe, it’s usually areas near schools, busy intersections and high-traffic roads in which they’re installed.  Most of the time it looks like they’re installed in areas closer to schools with a primary objective of busting all the shitheads who drive too fast in school zones and having an automated means of issuing citations without a human cop to do it.

Additionally, ‘Murica is too cheap to plant these things in places without just cause, and I don’t think they’re randomly positioning these without any sort of data or justification.  They seem to be placed on major veins and well-traveled roads that suspicious people could potentially use, and should the need ever arise to try and locate a suspicious person, they could triangulate a location better with this kind of footage.

Frankly, I like to believe that they’re being placed in areas where people actually might care more about the crime rates of the area.  On the flip-side, I bet there are few or no Flock cameras near my old house on the south side.  And if there were, I’m sure that’s where there’s destruction of property, because the crime rate down there was already high, and the last thing any of those crooks would want is anyone having the chance to surveil them and possibly increase their odds of prevention.

I kind of get it though.  On the simple preference of if you would mind being watched over having greater privacy, I’d probably pick the privacy myself.  But considering that decision has been taken away from me, at least in areas where there are Flock cameras, I’m not sweating anything, because I don’t (at least I hope) practice in any nefarious or shady activities that I would be concerned about being monitored over, especially to the point of where I need to go sabotage and destroy government property.

The funniest part about the above image is the planting of the American flag in the destruction of a Flock camera.  It was clearly done in a manner in which the flag is acting not just as a symbol of defiance, but straight up like a middle finger.  This is the kind of shit I’d imagine like Ukrainian forces doing over a pile of dead Russian soldiers, or like when in 2006, the Korean national baseball team defeated Japan in the World Baseball Classic and planted their flag on the pitching mound, causing Ichiro to crash out.  But with these incidents of Flock camera destroying it’s basically ‘Muricans giving the middle finger to, America, and I often don’t believe there’s any country in the world that hates so much of its own country more than America does.

Speaking of Korea though, getting back to the title of this post, the people who hate Flock cameras, they most definitely would not last four seconds in Korea.  From the busiest neighborhoods in Seoul to the shittiest back alleys in like Pohang, there are CCTV cameras covering probably 75% of the entire peninsula.  My mother-in-law and I walked through a historical park that was pretty wooded and nature-y, and wouldn’t you know it, CCTV cameras were affixed to live trees, monitoring over the walking trails, and at multiple points during our trip, I’d remind her that the cameras were everywhere.

And they’ve got surveillance teams in surveillance rooms that look like Avengers HQ with how many screens and cameras they all have to monitor at all hours of the day.

Yeah, if Flock-hating ‘Muricans are up in arms over a few cameras going up along busy streets, I don’t think they have the perspective to know things could be way, way, way worse, compared to places like Korea, where surveillance is 70% more big-brotherly and privacy is way lower.  But again, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what does it really matter?

The ever-increasing aggravation of phone avoidance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Much like the rest of ‘Murica, I don’t really like having to speak on the phone.  Frankly, I don’t like having to interact with other people if it can be avoided.  However, there are plenty of times in which I understand that a vocal interaction is capable of being way more productive than trying to do things over text messages or emails, and I will pick up the phone and make calls when necessary.

The other day, I had two things I wanted to accomplish: contact an optometrist and make an appointment for my dad to get an eye exam and some new glasses, and set up an appointment with my pest control people because it’s that time of year in which ants decide to intrude in my home and I don’t understand why ants exist in the first place.

When the business day was effectively over, neither objective was any closer to accomplishment than the start of the day and it’s partially my fault for thinking that text correspondence was going to get the jobs done as opposed to just calling up the places I needed to speak with.

The optometrist that I had in mind, not only would they not pick up their phone during business hours, there was a message that gave a phone number that could be texted for business purposes.  Hm, I thought, maybe they’d be like Delta Airlines and be more efficient at getting shit done over text than over the phone.

I was wrong.  The number I was given took three hours to get back to me, and responded to me as if I were an existing patient and was referring to bloodwork, and when I corrected them, they were like oh sorry, and gave me a different number to reach out to after 1:30 when the office was back from lunch break.  So I reach out to them, they don’t respond until two hours later, oddly in ALL CAPS, asking when I want to come in, and there’s no more response after I tell them the desired day in which I want to come in, and asked what information I need to give them in order to secure an appointment.

Mission failed.  Need to call tomorrow.

My pest control people, I reached out to them on Friday before the start of the business day via web submission, since it was early as fuck in which I realized that my annual ant problem was happening again.  No response at all, so Monday AM I call and ask what the delay is, since they’ve never taken this long to respond before, and am given a canned corn response that they’re busy and a scheduler will get in touch with me later.

Later comes, in the form of a text message, giving me a date and time that they’re available.  However, I am not, because of a work conflict, do you have another time?  No, we’ll just have to look for another time.

And then silence for the rest of the day.  Mission failed.  Need to call tomorrow.  But this time remind them that I’m over having an annual ant problem and that I will be reaching out to other companies now, and the first one available will be my go-forward pest control.

The point is, yes, having to speak with other people is a massive inconvenience that I understand that we all want to avoid if we can.  However, the issue is that the alternative is about as effective and efficient as trying to send an email with a cucumber or trying to construct an airplane with Fisher Price tools.  People hide behind the lack of pressure from real-time correspondence to suck at their jobs way more than they already do, and the clocks of life are never pausing, and the most important commodity in life, time, is continuously being wasted.

Until people on the other ends of the lines can prove to me that text correspondence can be remotely as efficient as pursuing a forced interaction over a phone, I need to remind myself to just forego the typing and just get in the grills of people and force them to speak, because when the day is over, I want to meet my objections and be efficient with my time over the convenience of not having to interact with others.

Revisionist history is fun not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I get set off so easily by news from the airline industry.  Maybe it’s because I’m constantly frustrated by the endlessly elevating cost of travel, compounded by all of the traveling I wish I’ve done that I struggle to try and make reality.  Maybe it’s because the industry is so full of bullshit that’s so easy to sniff out, where companies are getting richer by the second while consumers have long been left in the dust at being able to keep up with rising costs.  Maybe it’s because of years of having flight privileges and then not has me with some resentful shell shock at what it costs for the rest of the world to travel and it manifests as vitriol toward in the industry.

Maybe it’s just all of the above to varying degrees.

Anyway, I read this article about how airline travel costs aren’t coming down in spite of the plunging costs of jet fuel, and this is one of those situations where an explanation isn’t needed at all; most of us in the world know and accept that the airline industry is just a bunch of greedy fucks who will continue to increase and increase costs and that going backward is absolutely not an option.  But an explanation is given, courtesy of Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian, and naturally all it does is incite anger and frustration to anyone like me, stupid enough to read it.

However, the worst part is that from the time I originally read it, to the time I’m taking the time to write about it, the original post as well as all links, feeds and summaries about the original post have all been since edited, to make Bastian look like not quite the disgusting money-grubbing corporate asshole, because there was a quote originally that basically blamed the rich for why fares will indefinitely remain high, because the affluent don’t want to run the risk of the poors getting on their hallowed Delta jets.

It really was a sight to behold, a masterclass of white man CEO-ing, where Bastian completely dodged accountability, threw his richest customers under a speeding bus, acknowledged the class disparity in the world by also blaming the poors for existing, all while not even trying to stop spinning bullshit about the dollars and cents that make Delta and all the other airlines are grubbing for with every ounce of energy they have.

Revisionist history truly is an incredible thing.  Clearly, smarter people than Bastian quickly realized the disgusting horror of his original words and cashed in a whole lot of favors for them to be able to scrub the entire fucking internet so quickly to revise his words to not necessarily stop blaming the rich, but to soften the accusations that the poors are why the rich are the reason why fares remain high.

The funniest (ironically) thing about this whole thing is that it was wholly unnecessary for Bastian or any CEO to even pipe up about this whole thing.  It’s one of those things most people already know and have begrudgingly accepted the fact that airline costs will never, ever, ever come down because the industry, much like all other corporations, really like money, and when they get used to seeing how much of it comes in on account of a hike, they would rather eat their young before bringing it back down, regardless of if the reason for the increase swings back downward or goes away outright.

Not only did anyone not have to say anything about this, no airline really even has to do anything in order to try and placate airline travelers.  Like, Delta tries to justify keeping their airfare costs astronomical by introducing the most minimal of perks, like a discount or reduction of bag fees, or a tweak to boarding process – but only for those in first or business class, and possibly the less pleeb-ey pleebs in economy plus.  With absolutely zero consideration for the economy and Spirit basic class, whose nickels and dimes are the real reason why the company makes a gozillion dollars a year.

Yeah, Delta doesn’t even have to do that, because the whole airline industry is full of collusion, and if all carriers agree to the same uniform set of draconian in-flight privileges, then nobody is required to deviate from the status quo.  In fact, the fact that Delta is doing such is only going to piss off the people operating United, American and any of the other carriers that will most likely have to tweak their operations in order to fight for the five passengers per flight who are fickle enough to pick one over the other on account of such trite perks.

And then of course, these too will disappear in the future, regurgitating and recycling the droll state of airline traveling for consumers, and then the whole thing will restart itself in 12-18 months, but with fares another $40 higher across the board.  Because of inflation, fuel costs, too many poors getting on, etc.

God bless ‘Murica