Tag: white people

New cars are useless without improving the infrastructure

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ATL Urbanize: MARTA’s train cars of the future unveiled in a ceremony full of people acting impressed who will probably never ride them again

It’s funny, among the things that I try to do on the regular, is that I like to look back and see the posts I made in previous years, and not that long ago, I came across a post I made back in 2022, writing about a proposed train car redesign MARTA had in the works.  I chuckled a little at my own analogy about how it looked like a cross-breed between a Daft Punk helmet and a Mass Effect Cerberus shock trooper, with its prevalent colored light in the front, but mostly allowed myself to have a thought about where the fuck these supposed train cars of tomorrow were, considering the post was from three years ago.

So it wasn’t that distantly past in my brain when I found out that MARTA actually just unveiled the supposed train cars of the future in recent ceremony, filled to the gills with press, bureaucrats and a bunch of people who have never actually used public transportation in their adult lives, all applauding and congratulating mostly themselves at the unveiling of a singular shiny new train car, with supposed promises that they’ll be operational and ready for the pleebs public in July.

Like I opined three years ago, as much as I had my clowning shoes on and I am always ready to get ready to criticize and textually rip MARTA apart for what is usually most likely misspent funds and poor operations, the new cars really aren’t that bad.  The current trains are all dated as fuck, and it’s like they literally transported the Washington DC’s old Metro cars to Atlanta, while they dumped their even older cars into the ocean, so some fresh new train cars are actually a great idea in the grand spectrum of running a transit authority.

From what I have been able to see, the new train cars are like, one gigantic car, with no portioning or separation between them.  I’m sure there’s a good reason for doing such, but at the same time, I’ve seen criticisms about how this will enable train trash like bums, grifters, panhandlers, and other knuckleheads to kind of have more freedom to roam and troll the entire train, instead of being portioned off into a singular car, and give riders a chance at avoiding them.

I used to snidely remark about how I’d donate $100 to a charity of anyone’s choosing if I were ever able to ride MARTA without having to hear someone else’s music, which is to say that such never happened in all the times that I’ve done such, but now that cars will be open and accessible to all riders instead of single cars, I have a feeling that dickhead behavior isn’t really going to change so much as it’s going to evolve, much like a variant of the flu.

Which leads to the very obvious observation that new train cars are nice and all, but if the general infrastructure of MARTA itself doesn’t improve, it doesn’t matter how many shiny new rail cars with interactive screens and fancy lights up front to avoid confusion on what line you’re on is.  If riders don’t feel safe, or have confidence that the trains will work, be on time, and not break down, nothing is going to change from how things are today.

MARTA still has a piss-poor reputation, remains the butt of jokes for the city, and faces an uphill battle as endless as Sisyphus.  Keith Parker was the last guy that managed to actually improve things, but it was clear he was pushed to his patience’s limit before he cut and run, and the guy that followed him was drained by MARTA so badly that he killed himself.

I don’t pay attention to the minutiae of MARTA like I used to in the past, but I’m not sure new train cars are going to really solve much if the perception and infrastructure of the authority hasn’t improved at all.  New cars are one thing, but the fact that MARTA itself hasn’t added any real new stops, showed any expansion whatsoever, and is still going back and forth on the same mostly useless cross-shaped map, nothing has really changed.

But hey, at least the trains are going to look cool.  I wonder just how much pocket lining every single train is going to make a bunch of shadow investors?  All I know is that if I ever find out, I’m sure there’ll be a brog post about it.

Seems appropriate that Zombie Deer have made their way to Georgia

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Chronic Wasting Disease, aka the zombie deer disease has started showing up in Georgia

A friend of mine already popped all the actual science behind a lot of this, but imagine how much my imagination exploded upon hearing the words “zombie deer” and “in Georgia.”  The fact that I’m posting about it regardless of the fact that I’ve heard the science that mostly ruins my fantasy that this is the start of the zombie apocalypse goes to show that much like actual zombies, there is life in this topic, even after it it’s dead.

Sure, it is has a 100% kill rate among deer that get infected, which sucks for the deer, and unsurprising, there have been many cases of humans who have already eaten CWD-infected venison.  Yes, there have been deaths in some cases, but as long as the dumbasses aren’t eating The Big Texan slabs of it, it seems to mostly just result in horrific intestinal issues that don’t always kill humans.

Originally, I had all these grand ideas about how Georgia and inevitably the rest of the world were going to be fucked, because relying on the subsect of hunters that fall into categories of being dumb, uneducated, ignorant, some of all of the above if not completely all of the above, to not eat infected venison, allow the disease to mutate and become zootic, leading to the zombie plague for humanity, seemed kind of inevitable.

And how the thought of the zombie apocalypse beginning still seemed preferable to the orange-colored America we were going to be embarking on for the next four years, and I likened it to my version of the choosing the bear meme that women had with a little while ago.

At least in a zombie apocalypse, sure the rate of mortality would probably drop tremendously for humanity as a species, but at least if any zombies threatened me or my family, the opportunity to legally bludgeon and beat the ever-living fuck out of something would be unlocked, and completely in the name of self-defense.  A life-long fantasy of killing zombies seems like a fair trade off, in exchange for getting away from lily-orange America, at least it does in my opinion.

But no, like I said, a friend of mine already burst my bubble by dropping a lot of actual factual science as far as CWD goes which is funny that it’s such an acronym, considering it’s so very close to the popular The Walking Dead TWD acronym.  And most everyone knows that Georgia is basically the zombie capital of America, considering it’s history for being the backdrop for TWD, Zombieland, and all sorts of zombie film and television at this point.  So it seems very appropriate for zombie deer to finally have made their arrival in Georgia, and it’s really a surprise in itself that it didn’t start here in the first place.

Honestly, it would’ve been more surprising had it been unanimous

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker: Ichiro voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but denied unanimous induction by one anonymous vote; reactions are as expected

Like the subject says, it would’ve been more surprising if Ichiro did get the vaunted unanimous decision and make it into the Hall of Fame with the most noteworthy of honors.  But baseball has a problem in their legacy department, and they don’t seem to be in any rush at all to try and alleviate it.  So unsurprising to just about any baseball fan who knows how the voting process works, Ichiro does make the Hall of Fame, as predicted, but, as many have before him, failed to get 100% unanimity, and the part of the internet that cares about this, goes ballistic.

The funny thing is that I predicted that this was probably going to happen back in 2020, when I went on an identical diatribe about how fucked up it was that a single voter denied Derek Jeter the unanimous entry.  I could just have easily just sticky’d and reposted that old post, copy/pasted the whole thing and just replaced “Derek Jeter” with “Ichiro” and it would’ve translated itself fairly seamlessly, but I’m an old man who clearly likes to talk about the same shit over and over again, and am going through the futile exercise of writing about it again.

So here we are again, where some anonymous voter is getting off at knowing that they alone have sparked the internet hate machine, and have thousands of keyboard warriors who want their head on a spike.  Naturally, they’re content with the chaos that they caused and will have absolutely no intention of revealing themselves, because that would assume a modicum of accountability they want to take, and people these days dodge accountability like they’re agents from The Matrix dodging bullets.

People calling for credentials to be revoked, voting rules to be changed, more accountability and transparency; all logical and pragmatic ideas, but none of them are going to occur.  I surmise the only way a vote is actually revoked is when the presumably old, white, guy croaks and he’s physically unable to return a ballot for multiple years and the old white guys at the BBWAA offices start getting return to sender and get the message that the voter might have died.

Lots of hypothetical guesses that it’s the same guy who didn’t vote for Jeter, and frankly, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to put them in the same basket as the guys who didn’t vote for Cal Ripken, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey, Jr., Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson, among other legends of the game where their inductions probably should have been unanimous.

Personally, I’ve been spouting off on random comment threads and accusing Bill Ballou out of Boston, because he’s the dude who went on an arrogant diatribe back in 2019 about how he didn’t vote for Mariano Rivera, but just didn’t turn in his ballot, thus still allowing him to get the only unanimous vote in HOF history, but someone somewhere rebutted to me that his vote this year was made public, and he did actually vote for Ichiro.  Other names of baseball writers I’ve never heard of have been thrown out there, but there are many, and none of them are taking the bait to defend themselves, and actually helping the cause of identifying the lone tryhard, so it’s really all futile all the same.

Here’s the thing too – I don’t even really like Ichiro, as a person.  In the two World Baseball Classics he participated in, he got a little too uppity nationalistic and made disparaging remarks about Korea, despite Korea holding their own against his Japanese squad, and although the rest of the world’s baseball fandom still idolizes him, I still see him as a bit of an asshole from that angle.  But as a baseball player, there really were few better and consistent and talented as he was, and I respect all of his actual baseball accolades.

Of course he deserved to get in unanimously.  For years, people have been coming up with reasons why he shouldn’t get in, at all or first ballot, and throughout his tenure in MLB, he’s knocked them all down.  People loved to discount the 2,000+ hits he had in Japan, and said it would be cheating for him to add that to his hit total to surpass 3,000, so he just went ahead and notched 3,000+ hits in MLB alone.  Along the way, he surpassed Pete Rose as the all-time leader in cumulative hits.  Won numerous batting titles, gold gloves, and AL Rookie of the Year and MVP at the same time.  Frankly, the only thing that eluded him was a World Series, but frankly that could happen to anyone who’s majority was spent in Seattle.

But unsurprisingly, he was denied.  Another legend, denied the ultimate honor, by a spineless, anonymous, most likely white guy, determined to upstage the whole idea of HOF voting in order to put themselves over.  And the BBWAA as a whole doesn’t seem to care, so it all but assures that this is going to happen continuously in the future.

Which means in 2027 when Albert Pujols shows up on the ballot, he basically already has a 0% chance of being unanimous.  Forget about his multiple World Series rings with the Cardinals, the 700+ home runs, all the MVPs and other hardware.  Forget about his charity, philanthropy and squeaky-clean image that made him look like a Dominican Mr. Clean.  A voter somewhere is going to see 2027 as an opportunity to become the most wanted man on the internet with a 100% success rate of getting away with it, and completely capitalize on it.

The funny thing is that unlike Jeter, Ichiro probably does care that he didn’t get unanimous.  During the press conference, Ichiro basically started off talking about the one vote he didn’t get, inviting the mystery voter out for a drink to have a talk.  American audiences guffawed about that one, but let’s read between the lines here, Ichiro’s Japanese honor code and general psychotic dedication to baseball says that he probably considers his entire baseball career a failure because of this one guy.  And as I predicted a long time ago, I still think the man is going to fucking kill someone, and this mystery voter has probably just climbed the list of people whom might be that someone.

I am in the wrong segment of this industry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Forbes: Walmart “rebrands” for the first time in nearly 20 years, response is predictable but justifiable

Often times I get pegged of being jaded or pessimistic about the design industry.  Why are you in it then?  If you don’t like it, do something else with your life.  And so on, and so on.

Well, this is a prime example of why I, and other designers end up the way we do, is when we hear about the richest companies on the planet, dumping millions of dollars into rebranding efforts, that in this case are literally taking their old logo and adding 1-2 points of stroke around it, and then calling it rebrand.

By the way, this Sisyphus-ian effort cost $1.25 million dollars.

Honestly, in the history of rebrands, $1.25M isn’t the worst or highest dollar amount sunk into one, but considering the sheer lack of effort that went into this, it’s still pretty noteworthy, and undoubtedly chalks up to be a classic example of egregious corporate waste of money.

For years, I’ve always called the Walmart star “the butthole” because let’s be real here, it basically looked like a little yellow sphincter, and I figured it was apropos that they did that, considering the sheer amounts of fucking they did to the market, economy and small business.  Also, I personally think Walmart sucks ass as a whole, so there’s that association too.

I don’t really know or can fathom why Walmart felt the need to rebrand in the first place, but I guess if those in the world of business feel  if you’re not constantly evolving, you’re dying, shit like redundant, unnecessary and minimal effort rebrands gets accusatory eyes off your nuts for a minute and makes it look like they’re doing something, other than fucking the world of commerce and getting a bunch of old white men richer by the hour.

Seriously though, there’s really not as much to rant about as I felt there could’ve been; that’s just how little effort that Walmart put into this rebrand.  They literally just pressed increase stroke around both the butthole as well as the wordmark, and the end result is a bolder wordmark, and a butthole that has appeared to have gotten a little more clenched.

There’s an easy joke about the shitshow that 2025 and beyond seems like it’s going to be, leading to clenched anoos-es throughout ‘Murica, but I don’t get the impression that Walmart as a company isn’t necessarily in opposition to the parties that might be leading to these tighter assholes, so I don’t think it really works.

Perhaps it’s more representative to how the company is a bunch of tightwad fucks who sinch and clench and choke out small businesses throughout the world, squeezing all the way to their assholes, which is ultimately what the butthole represents.

Either way, I don’t shop there, and I actively go out of my way to typically avoid them when I can.  I like protecting my butthole literally and metaphorically, and don’t wish to support companies that go out their way to raze the buttholes of the people; as well as put out shitty creative and branding.

Notre Dame for the Natty; and chaos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An interesting thing happened this year’s college football bowl season; with the playoff expanded to 12 teams, it basically murdered any interest I could have in absolutely any other bowl game that wasn’t a CFB playoff game.  Even Virginia Tech being in the Belk Duke’s Mayo Bowl, which is maybe like a C-tier bowl, instead of the E-tier that shit like the TransPerfect Music City Bowl or ReliaQuest Bowl couldn’t interest me in the least bit.  And I don’t think such was the intention of the CFB committee, but at the same time I don’t think they should be surprised that fucks to give for any bowl that wasn’t a playoff game, actually ended up being quite minimal.

Anyway, the field is set for the National Championship, with it being The Ohio State University against Notre Dame, two schools I typically give no shits about beyond that I want to see them lose every time I hear their names in competition.  Not that I had any real horse in the race, but I obviously hoped for Georgia to win a third natty in recent years for the fact that they’re the hometown team for me, but their chances seemed like a wash when Carson Beck was ruled out after hurting himself in the SEC Championship.

Texas was my B-pick, because I proclaimed that the Natty really was theirs to lose; and it’s not because I like Texas by any stretch of the imagination, but if we really did end up with a Texas vs. UGA III, I didn’t think there was any chance that Georgia could upend them a third consecutive time in a single season.  And if there’s any consolation at all for me, there’s always some degree of satisfaction in being right.

However both schools shit the bed, and we’re stuck with TOSU and ND for the first-ever 12-team playoff version Natty, and I really couldn’t give a shit on who actually wins.  Honestly, I think TOSU is probably going to win, like a 38-17 contest because they look like world beaters right now, and they did win the first-ever 4-team playoff, so it just seems like one of those kismet things that they’d win the first-ever 12-team playoff, out of some weird tradition.

But for the sake of picking someone to root for, I think I’m going to be rooting for Notre Dame; not because I like them in the least bit*, but because Notre Dame winning a National Championship is basically the worst thing to happen for the CFB committee, who will undoubtedly be facing a lot of difficult questions should ND win the Natty, and I like the idea of chaos being brought to their doorstep instead of TOSU getting to be National Champions.

*especially since they no longer have a Korean kicker

Continue reading “Notre Dame for the Natty; and chaos” →

Of course white people need their own version of Squid Game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker: US remake of Squid Game by David Fincher confirmed

Here’s the thing, I actually really like David Fincher.  Man did Fight Club and Mindhunter, two titles I hold in extremely high regard.  But I do harbor some sour grapes for him for being the cocksucker who will apparently be spearheading an American-localization of Squid Game, which seems about as essential as little silicone pot attachments to prop open your lids or hold your ladles.

Obviously, I am hardly a fan of any time Hollywood gets their greedy grubby claws into an idea that is not inherently theirs, but then whitewashes the fuck out of them because white people in America are too xenophobic and/or illiterate to consume anything that isn’t produced in America or has subtitles and requires reading to comprehend.

Squid Game is already an amazing series with fantastic visuals, storytelling, writing, music and overall production, and requires absolutely no remaking.  But Americans are too fucking lazy and unintelligent that one is apparently in the works to be made, which we all know is going to have nothing but bullshit American actors and performers, and out of respect to the Orientals, they’ll probably cast one Asian guy to be the American equivalent of Abdul Ali, who was the token foreigner in Korea, except that’ll probably end up being Henry Golding.

Benedict Cumberbatch will undoubtedly be Gi-Hyun, and the Red Light/Green Light doll will be remade to look like Sabrina Carpenter.  And because they’ll want to have some diversity, and we all know “diversity” in American means “black people,” they’ll have Tiffany Haddish be the Front Man, except that it’s now the Front Woman, where they can kill two birds with one stone by having a black woman in a prevalent role.

Like I said, David Fincher is a good director whom I do like his works, but it definitely is a bitter pill to swallow that he’s taking point on a flagrant example of white washing.  Squid Gmae doesn’t need recreation.  American audiences need better education and reinforced understanding that the world does not cater to them.  Accept that outstanding media can come from other countries and learn how to fucking read subtitles.

As Ho Bong-Joon said,

Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.

It’s astounding the arrogance of America to take something wildly successful and not requiring of any recreation, and doing it anyway, and wasting inevitably an ungodly amount of money and resources to do so, when instead better stories and content could have been created instead.

I want to say that I’ll refuse to watch an inevitable Squid Game remake, but I’m not going to kid myself, curiosity and the inevitable want to make a scathing comparison might make me do so, regardless of my vitriol for the idea in the first place.  The want for brog content is endless, and if it inspires writing, I’m usually game for just about anything.

**I actually gave this some more thought after I had initially written this, and I think I’ve figured out why there is a perceived need for a white people version of Squid Game.  I’ve seen a lot of memes and reels about Squid Game as of late, and I’ve noticed that almost all of them are referring to characters solely by their player numbers.

And it’s my belief that this spurred the want for a variant of Squid Game where the characters can have good ol’ American names like Dave or Harold, so that white people can avoid the indignity of being exposed for not being able to, or having to suffer the potential embarrassment of having to pronounce ching-chongey foreign names like Gi-Hun, Sae-Byeok, Geum-Ja or Abdul Ali, when they want to inevitably talk about Squid Game with other people.

Because if there’s one thing white people really dislike, it’s feeling self-conscious about potentially sounding racially insensitive about other cultures, so it seems like classic white people logic to instead of learning how to properly pronounce Korean names to just instead drop millions on millions of dollars to just remake Squid Game altogether, where Gi-Hun can go by Timothee, Dae-Ho can be Kaiden, Nam-Gyu can be Trent and In-Ho can be Hunter.

Now it makes perfect sense to why a white people version of Squid Game even needs to come to fruition.

I hate to admit it, but I support this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo – orange guy vows to end daylight savings time, citing it as ‘inconvenient‘ and ‘very costly’

I don’t hide the fact that I’m not a fan of the orange guy, or really any politics for that matter, but especially since I had children, I’ve always bemoaned how much I loathe daylight savings, and would tongue-in-cheek say that I would support anyone who worked in favor of eliminating it.

All because some farmers in like 1069AD felt it was too dangerous to be out doing their shit in the pitch darkness of an early morning, the whole world had to deal with this bullshit concept.  Don’t get me wrong, farmers and agriculture are undoubtedly important to the functionality of civilization, but I feel like there have been enough studies done throughout modern times that have debunked the real need for it in the grand spectrum of things.

Clearly, those who are not in agreement of the lack of necessity of daylight savings are not parents, or apparently, rich white 1%-ers whom seem to be the ones trying to justify the elimination of it in, citing it as a hinderance to earning potential. 

I don’t get to capitalize on the bonus hour, because I have young children who don’t know what daylight savings is, and neither do their circadian rhythms are, so it usually ends up as a morning where they naturally wake up at 6:45 am because their bodies think it’s 7:45 am, with the difference is that my phone has adjusted for the hour change, and I’m getting up at the same time they are, with the difference is that breakfast is not ready, I haven’t had coffee or a bathroom break, dog hasn’t eaten or gone out, and it’s just a colossal shitshow that takes days of adjustment.

And then the spring forward, not only am I exhausted from losing an hour, the kids are tired and groggy from losing theirs, and everyone has a miserable day, capped off with the fact that there’s school and work the following day and it’s no longer the life where I can just sleep in on every single weekend day of my life like I used to prior to having children.

Screw the farmers, and parents who are afraid of their kids having to stand at bus stops in the darkness, need to work with their communities and neighborhoods to improve infrastructure, or have better thought out locations for bus stops and use their heads and common sense to get out of the way of moving vehicles.

All I’ve always said is that I don’t care if we stay in daylight savings or spring forward, I honestly don’t know the official designation between the two, I just want to outright eliminate the shifting of an hours twice a year bullshit, and never have to deal with it again. And if it makes me an asshole to stand on the side with those arrogant rich white fuckheads, so be it, because I fucking hate daylight savings and want it gone as much as they do.