Tag: wtf

The white man’s equivalent to blackout license plate covers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While I was commuting to the office one day, I noticed a Ford Bronco that had a vanity license plate that consisted of nothing but 1’s and I’s.  So if you can picture this description in your head, you can imagine that it’s basically a vanity plate with seven straight lines at a quick glance.  You can also probably also imagine that at a quick glance, it’s probably impossible to accurately pinpoint what the correct combination of characters is, which is more than likely the intention of the white guy who chose it and I’m confident that it’s a white guy because only white people drive and covet Ford Broncos the way they do.

The thing is, this isn’t the first deliberately deceptive vanity tag I’ve seen, it’s just that now I felt like writing about it, and how it seems to be a pattern that it’s always white men who tend to have them.  1I11II1, 0O00OO0, B888BB8, or any other combination of characters that have the capability to blend and confuse human eyes, which is more than likely the intention.  And when people have the intention to deceive, than more than likely it’s so that they can get away with deceit; probably just driving like a dick, but these days the hopes and thoughts that they can confuse the antichrist-like nefarious flock cameras that are all the rage in the increasing environment of surveillance.

And it’s always white males that do this.  Every time I’ve noticed one of these types of plates and I’ve managed to pull adjacent to the vehicle, it’s always been a white guy.  It’s not hyperbole, and it’s not just an isolated incident.  Definitely more than this one instance, but maybe not quite ten times, but every single time I’ve seen a deliberately confusing vanity tag, it’s been a white guy.

Clearly, this is the white man’s equivalent to the blackout license plate covers that black people who want to drive like dicks put on their cars; the intention is the same, but the approaches are different.  Black folk don’t want The Man and Big Brother to have it easy identifying their whips while they drive however the fuck they want to, so they use dark covers and obscurers, but in only the way Whitey can do, white folk do it by hiding in plain sight with completely legal, albeit hard to decipher, vanity plates.

I have a friend that’s in law enforcement, and they said that modern plate readers have no issue in being able to identify vague license plates, so really the intention of them is to confuse other people on the road.  The irony is that white or black, people who want to act like they’re trying to obstruct and make their license plates less identifiable, only draw more scrutiny to themselves by going to the lengths they do. 

If I saw an orange Ford Bronco whose license plate was a state-issued CWN5637, I’ll have forgotten it by the next light, but regardless of if I’m accurate or not, I’ll remember seeing I1II11I or whatever such combination actually is and know that the guy driving it is probably some entitled white guy who drives like a douche.

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.

Braves Job Alert: mid-tier Latino pitchers pls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I saw a news article about how a former Atlanta Braves pitcher, Carlos Carrasco, had signed with the LG Twins of the Korea Baseball Organization.  This tingled my spider-senses because it was about baseball, it was about a guy who had been on the Braves, it was about Korea, it was about the KBO, where I had just seen a game for the first time, and it also just so happened to have featured the LG Twins; who lost to the Doosan Bears in spite of being the team with the better record when they play, but hey that’s why the play the games.

Anyway, in spite of my general ambivalence and distance from the Braves and just sports in general, I am familiar with Carlos Carrasco, because he was a guy on the team that it seemed to be notorious that he was cut from the major league roster pretty much every other week, before being re-signed by the Braves, pitch in a game or two, before being designated for assignment again, and the cycle would repeat itself, seemingly over and over again.

That’s not the kind of distinction any player should want, but for a bad sports fan like me who is more often times fascinated by the weird and interesting happenstances of sports, it’s how I remembered who he was.

It was in the 2025 season that I first noticed the pattern of Carrasco being jerked around, because it seemed to happen a lot, way more than I’d noticed it happening to any player before.  I mean, Uncle Jesse Chavez got a similar treatment in prior years, especially by the Braves, but not to the frequency in which it was happening to Carrasco.

According to Gemini, Carrasco’s 2025 season actually was, the most extreme case of revolving door roster ping-ponging for any player in history, as the poor guy was released and brought back an unprecedented seven times throughout the season. 

My knee-jerk reaction was that this had to have been related to the cheap-ass Braves wanting to save money and that the small gaps in between his cuts and re-signings, they’d be absolved of having to pay prorated daily wages, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how contracts work and that he was still due his contracted amount, and that his roster spot was more valuable and the chief reason for constantly shuffling him around. 

But at the same time, I don’t think the cheap-ass Braves’ payroll department was complaining about the lack of logistics and per-diem envelopes they were saving by the occasional absence of his physical being, so fuck those cheap bean counters all the same.

But the thing is, and I touched on it a second ago, with Jesse Chavez getting a similar treatment before Carrasco, is that I’ve come to the scientifically proven conclusion* that the Atlanta Braves seem to require the need to have a Latino pitcher of the mediocre, swingman variety, that they will jerk around back and forth on the roster and give them absolutely no chance to breathe, settle in, or genuinely feel like a part of the team.

*As much as I don’t want to have to explain that this is tongue-in-cheek, and that I have zero readers, I’ve been dealing with a lot of astonishingly stupid people on the internet and that’s my bad for engaging communities in the first place

So, it started, or rather I actually noticed this, in 2024, with the aforementioned Jesse Chavez; the man was already beloved in Atlanta, and prior to 2024, already had four prior stints with the Braves, including being a member of the 2021 World Series squad.  But after his championship contributions, the team didn’t get caught up in recency bias, let him walk, and he signed with the Cubs in 2022, where he did not start well, and in April, was traded back to the Braves, where he suddenly turned back into good Uncle Jesse, and pitched so well that the team was able to sell high on him and traded him to the Angels that August.  Apparently, changing out of his Braves uni made him suck again, and not even a full month later, the Angels cut him, and take a guess who was waiting to pick him back up?  The Braves.  Naturally, he pitched well for Atlanta again, and there was a funny narrative that was born about how he sucked for everyone except the Braves.

Uncle Jesse would sign and stay with the Braves for the entire 2023 season, and because he was on the Braves, he pitched well, enough to where he parlayed it into signing with the White Sox for more money the following season.  He bombed out in Spring Training and the Sox were forced to cut him, and naturally the Braves would pick him back up, and with someone else picking up half of his salary, would deliver again.  And then he’d sign with the Texas Rangers, suck, and of course the Braves would snatch him up again.

Which brings us to the 2025 season, where at 41, the magic was wearing off, and even in the magical Braves uni that gave him so much strength in the past, Chavez had become the next victim to the undefeated Father Time, his ERA ballooned up to 9.00, and the revolving door roller coaster began.  Two times he was cut and picked back up, with the second one of those he wasn’t even used, but it was at his third cut on July 17, 2025 that Chavez would declare his retirement from the game outright.

And on July 31, 2025, Carlos Carrasco was called up from the minor leagues.  I don’t know if he realized it, but he was basically going to be filling the void that Jesse Chavez had left behind, and he would remain on the squad for two weeks before getting his first cut, and then be brought back to finish out the season, literally one day later.

November 6, 2025, Carrasco would be cut by the Braves which is funny because the season was already over, but this would effectively be start of the 2026 season, where he would be about to make history:

11.06.25: cut by Braves (1)
11.08.25: signed by Braves
04.30.26: cut by Braves (2)
05.01.26: signed by Braves
05.07.26: cut by Braves (3)
05.08.26: signed by Braves
05.31.26: cut by Braves (4)
06.02.26: signed by Braves
06.12.26: cut by Braves (5)
06.15.26: signed by Braves
06.26.26: cut by Braves (6)
07.05.26: signed by Braves
07.09.26: cut by Braves (7)
07.22.26: signed by LG Twins

The scary thing is that this was just half of the season.  Imagine how many more times Carrasco would have ping-ponged in the months of July and August alone, before September call-ups would have probably done him in.

My knee-jerk reaction was naturally of amusement, and how Carrasco was probably thrilled to be getting a steady paycheck and probably have a consistent locker to use for the remainder of the 2026 season, even if he had to pack all his shit and go to Korea.  But the results speak for themselves, in his first start, Carrasco pitched seven perfect innings against the Doosan Bears, setting himself up to look like a demigod in Korea after being a training dummy in MLB.

Which brings us to the third guy in the picture above, Elieser Hernandez.  He’s no spring chicken at 31 years of age, and his MLB experience is nothing to sign about, having around 300 innings over six years of MLB experience, pitching in a variety of roles.  His career ERA was 5.10 prior to coming to the Braves. 

However, with the departure of Carrasco, Hernandez was called up on July 19, 2026, and he made his presence felt for Braves fans when he came out of the bullpen in a slugfest with the Baltimore Orioles on July 24, 2026, and pitched three innings of one-hit ball, getting the win.

He was promptly rewarded for his heroics by getting cut by the Braves on July 27, 2026, but he would re-sign with the team one day later.  Three days after that, he’d pitch three innings in a win against the Washington Nationals, notching an old-school three inning save, and I’m sure there’s some obscure stat where Elieser Hernandez is the first guy in MLB history to have his first two appearances with a team getting a Win and a Save, with a DFA in between.

Guess what happened two days ago?
August 3, 2026: Elieser Hernandez released by the Braves.

But then guess what happened one day ago?
August 4, 2026: Elieser Hernandez signed by the Braves.

Obviously the game is different now than it was five, ten, and twenty years ago.  Roster management is more important than it’s ever been, especially for poor teams and crying-poor teams who need to maximize their processes and efficiencies as optimally as possible to hope to have a prayer at competing against the Dodgers and their billion-dollar payroll of superstars that don’t have to be micromanaged.

And I’d be naïve if I didn’t assume that this is the kind of behavior that every team does to a degree, and that it’s not just the cheap-ass Braves doing it.  But it funny to conclude with the narrative that the Atlanta Braves have this mandatory requirement to have a Latino pitcher to be repeatedly spinning through the ringer, cutting and re-signing over and over again, and frankly it’s probably this kind of front office bullshit that will surely be a bullet point of contention this off-season when the owners and MLB players union embark on their collision course for next season’s inevitable strike.

SummerSlam, blets and moments

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t watch SummerSlam, nor did I actually care to even exert a modicum of effort in order to watch it.  I know that my general fandom of the WWE product has been tested and waning over the last year or so and the grand consensus of all the changes and corporatization of the company is resulting in me gaining more and more distance from the product like it were 1990 all over again and my parents cancelling cable television, preventing me from keeping up with the biz.

Every show is behind a different pay wall, Fanatics has standardized and priced merchandise to inaccessibility, and frankly the product blows chunks now.  Storylines are convoluted and limited to the smallest of pools, and RAW on Netflix is so overwhelmingly buried in ads, I sometimes feel like I’m watching a pirated stream instead of a program that I’m paying a subscription to watch.

That being said, when one of my bros asked our group chat if anyone were watching SummerSlam, it took me 0.2 seconds to respond ‘no.’  I left out the part that I thought it was probably going to be mid as fuck, and the whole two-night show thing that TKO is trying to force like it’s a second Wrestlemania seems like bullshit and when the day is over, there were only two matches on the entire event that I remotely cared about.

Additionally, I knew that there was little point to watching the show, given the fact that with maybe an 18-minute delay, the results of every single match would be spoiled and revealed on various social media outlets, and I could get the Cliff’s notes on the entire show without having to sit through all the ads, rest holds, and botches from the gradual blunting of talent over the last years.

The good news for me was that the two matches I did care about, ended in the ways that I was happy with.  One was predictable, which was the culmination of Chad Gable’s redemption story, with him defeating Penta for the Intercontinental championship.  In the past, I would’ve said for certain that Gable was going to lose, because in the Vince McMahon era of the company, it was almost an unwritten rule that superstars did not win in their hometowns, but in the TKO era, they’re so obsessed with creating moments but more importantly farming footage for future UnTolds, that stuff like this flips, and it’s become pretty predictable, even moreso than it used to be, even for a wrestling oracle like myself.

But still, I’m happy to see Chad Gable get a signature W at the event, because the man has been one of the hardest working and mold-breaking performers over the last few years and it always brings me great joy to see hard workers get their just desserts.

The other match I was intrigued in, ended in really the only winner I had hoped for, but assumed was not going to be the case, which was Chelsea Green climbing to the top of the ladder and winning the Women’s championship, made vacant by the very legitimate Rhea Ripley injury.

As much as I love Chelsea and the internet loves Chelsea, there’s no denying that the E has treated her like this expendable comedy act, and given the fact that she was in the match with former champions like Charlotte, Jade Cargill and Tiffany Stratton, it seemed more likely the E would give it to one of the safe choices, and that Chelsea was there to provide some highlights and outstanding character work.

But the E loves to give surprises, and like I had mentioned, I’m convinced now that they’re so fixated on creating compelling content for UnTold documentaries, they allowed for the impossible to happen, and regardless of their motivations, I was stoked to discover that Chelsea Green had outlasted all the competition, and walked away as the new women’s champion.

Naturally, both these matches occurred on Night 2 of SummerSlam, and if the E really wants to ensure that two-day events have any modicum of succeeding in the long run, they have got to stop backloading their events so blatantly, because history has not been kind to the small number of two-day events they’ve held thusfar, with Night 1 shows being mid as fuck compared to their Night 2 counterparts.

Among the ocean of mediocrity that was the rest of SummerSlam, what stood out to me the most was the introduction of, what’s being called the ESPN Moment of the Night championship blet, inconsequentially being handed out, pretty informally on social media, to the worker of the show that, much to the low-hanging fruit name of the title goes, perceived to have made the best moment of the night.

Night 1 of SummerSlam, the “title” went to Oba Femi, presumably because of his emotional and landmark victory over Brock Lesnar, supposedly ending the career of one of the most impactful performers in the history of the business.  I mean, considering what else was on the card that night, it was pretty low-hanging fruit, and much like the importance of what the title represents, it’s pretty useless, and for a jaded smark like me, actually more of a detriment, because I kind of see it as ESPN giving a middle finger to all the oldhead fans like myself who don’t like all these paywalls, all these separate services, and all the infectious corporatization of the product we once loved so much.

That being said, as happy as I was to see Chelsea Green win the Women’s championship, it was like someone peeing into the pool of celebration when I later saw that ESPN had “awarded” her with the ESPN moment of the night blet, and seeing it on her shoulder in conjunction with an infinitely more meaningful prize on her other.  Fewer things spoil a good time than the arrival of the asshole that everyone doesn’t like but feels obligated to be civil towards because they have a lot of money and influence.

Either way, I’m stoked that performers I like got their flowers and moments at SummerSlam, but at same time I feel satisfied with my choice to not bother watching or pursuing the show because aside from those two matches I don’t really feel like I missed anything, and even if there were, it’s not like I wouldn’t be able to find it on YouTube or any other temporary hosting of the important things.

But that fucking ESPN blet, it is astonishing, that TKO has managed to create a championship blet that is somehow more meaningless and has less importance than any of the 25 straps circulating in the AEW/ROH wrestling space, as well as any of the 14 straps that Mercedes Mone was concurrently holding a little while back.

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.

Just stfu and play ball, Mookie

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: All-Star Mookie Betts wants MLB to basically implement a mercy rule and avoid position players pitching

One of the tiniest consolations of watching a baseball game where the score gets out of hand, is the off-chance of getting to see a position player come into the game and pitch.  If cheering for the team that’s up by a margin that warrants the entry of a position player, it’s kind of a fun, rubbing-it-in kind of mentality that they’re clobbering the opponent so bad that this is happening.  And if cheering for the team that’s getting clobbered, it’s the moment where the white flag has been raised, and hopefully they can relax a little bit and enjoy the entertainment of seeing a guy more than likely loft some meatballs to the plate, but occasionally make some surprising highlights.

Frankly, some of the more memorable highlights that I can recall easily in spite of being a shitty baseball fan, come from position player pitching:

Every one of these plate appearances I could recall off the top of my head without any thinking necessary.  That’s the beauty of position player pitching, it’s low risk, low stakes, high chance of fun, high chance of making positive memories.

And Mookie Betts wants it all to go away.

A man who has won four World Series, an MVP award, and is making $20 million dollars this year, $170 million in his career, with about $120 million waiting for him in deferred pay, all for playing a children’s game, somehow wants to play less baseball, even if it it’s just removing one of the more rare scenarios, and removing position player pitching and basically having a mercy rule instead.

Yeah, that’s never going to happen because of things called television deals, advertising rights, time to move concessions and merchandise, greedy owners getting their money’s worth out of their indentured servants, but (what should be) most importantly, fans getting the product that they volunteered to get when they decided to invest their time in a baseball game.

But fuck you anyway for even suggesting such a selfish, poor-optics and tone-deaf idea, because it’s not like having the opportunity to hack away at pitches from dudes who haven’t seriously pitched since they were teenagers is truly ruining your life.

Despite the fact that he players for the Dodgers, I generally have no qualm with Mookie Betts.  He seems like a decent guy, likes bowling, always shown to be real chill, one of my favorite authors adores the man.  But this absurd suggestion coming from him creeps him into Anthony Rendon-territory of coming off as selfish and greedy, wanting to even suggest reducing the amount of baseball he has to play despite making multi-generational wealth playing it.  I don’t, really agree with the notion that everyone gets an opinion on the matter, especially when the one trying to make it is a guy who makes absurd amounts of money playing baseball. 

This is where I’d say, how hard is it to take an at-bat against a guy probably throwing no harder than 60 mph, but apparently Mookie has but only one plate appearance against a position player, this season, against the Pirates’ Tyler Callihan; where he flew out to center.  So I guess his salt at not being able to basically get a free home run or base hit, and denting his batting stats by a ten-thousandth of a point entitles him to suggest implementing a mercy rule for everyone, got it.

In this regard, Mookie can go fuck himself.  Position player pitching should remain indefinitely, and it wouldn’t matter if it were Mookie Betts suggesting this, his douchebag teammate Dalton Rushing, or even someone I enjoyed like Freddie Freeman, Martin Prado, Chipper Jones, Jonny Venters, David DeJesus or Cal Ripken, Jr., my reaction would be the same, fuck off and stop acting like an overpaid man-child and take your at-bats against the backup catcher or veteran all-star just wanting to have some fun.  It’s the one of the only consolations of a lopsided game, and often times a reminder that baseball is supposed to be fun.

The ultimate high school #TRYHARD?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYP: Florida teen graduates high school with a mind-bending 11.99 GPA; prompts district to reexamine policy

Man, I thought I was a big deal when I was rocking a 3.8 GPA my senior year.  Meanwhile, this ubernerd is taking 44 AP classes, and college courses, completing their associate’s degree before finishing up high school, and I guess solved the meme-like riddle of how people can accumulate four years experience for entry level jobs.

Seriously though, when I was in high school, the defining standard of excellence was how close to a 4.0 GPA one could get to.  And in only the rarest of instances, you’d see kids nail that 4.0 or even exceed it by like 0.1 or 0.2 because of the two AP courses they took their senior year, and then they’re the class valedictorian.

But over the #SZNs of watching #TRYHARDs race across America at who can outdo others, we’ve witnessed ultra-competitive #TRYHARD students start notching GPAs that have crossed into the 5’s and even 7’s, en route to them being accepted into 162 colleges with accumulated scholarship offers eclipsing multiple millions of dollars.

And then we have this mensch down in Florida who attended George Steinbrenner High,* who somehow manages to get an astounding 11.99 GPA, and obviously the first question that comes to the minds of most rational observers, other than what a huge fuckin’ nerd, is, hoowwwwww???

*there’s a joke somewhere about how there’s actually a school named after the former, free-spending wheeling & dealing owner of the Yankees but I can’t figure one out

Don’t get me wrong, as obnoxious as the self-promotion and humble-bragging can get, I’m all for kids getting competitive over academics, as opposed to dumb TikTok trends or petty larcenies, because at least these brats might be learning some useful knowledge in their journeys, but hopefully they’re doing it because they want to be smarter, and not because it’s a route for internet notoriety.

Because as impressive as the feat was, I question the motivation behind it if the goal was merely to surpass the #TRYHARDs before them:

noting that [their] top aims were to “become valedictorian” and “break the state GPA record.” 

It’s worth mentioning that the Florida state GPA record before this kid was 11.84, so it’s not like this kid had broken into completely uncharted territory.  The academic policy was already busted, allowing kids to take questionably high and probably ethically risky course loads at young ages, it’s just that it’s now coming into question because it probably didn’t have the magnitude of spotlight on it previously.

But it does make me wonder if the kid really had the thirst for knowledge to take such a demanding course load, or if it was the equivalent of figuring out what he had to take in order to hit the XBOX achievement, and then going for solely that.

Considering the fact that they’re going to Duke, there’s always the innate possibility that the latter is very much in play.

The funny thing is, one of my knee-jerk reactions to the story was after picking up my jaw after seeing 11.99, was the obvious joke that although everyone might think it’s astounding at first to see such a high GPA, their minority (obviously) parents were probably completely unsold on it, and wondered why they didn’t get a full 12.0 GPA instead.  Like, what careless error on their quantum physics scantron did they get wrong that dropped them down to 11.99 and cost them the chance for immortality of 12?

Moving onto the proposed overhaul of school policy, #TRYHARD’s county realized the absurdity of someone being able to get such an astronomical GPA, and although they’re impressed, it sounds like they want to change things to where such shouldn’t be possible again; unsurprisingly, the nerd who just set the bar is all for overhaul, because it would effectively lock their GPA into immortality and basically prevent anyone in history from ever challenging it.  It’s like when a heel wrestler aspires to win a championship blet, so they can retire it and be the last guy in history books to hold it.

Either way, the question remains where this kid lands in the annals of #TRYHARDs.  The GPA and course load were of couse legendary, but without any background of how many colleges they applied to, how many they were accepted into, and how much scholarship offer money they amassed, we’ll never truly know.  But perhaps that’s the point, and much like they’re trying to slam the door on any future challengers to their record, by not disclosing the base counting #TRYHARD stats, we’ll never know where they stand in the rankings of ultimate #TRYHARDs.

Big-brain, 11.99 GPA logic.