Pleased AF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Often times, upon completion of presentation of a project, I wait a little bit afterward and then look at it again, to see whether or not I hate it yet.  So many times in my life I’ve made something, been very pleased with it, but then 1-2 days later I’ll look at it again but instead be completely disgusted with the things I create.  Regardless of what people might think or say about the things I make, when the day is over I am my very own worst critic and the true litmus test on whether or not I decide something I’ve created is satisfactory depends primarily on how I feel about it a little after it’s been out in the world.

Technically speaking, I am the creator of Arby’s Saucy_AF typeface they’ve released, as part of their marketing juggernaut team that I can proudly say that I know several members of.  I’m not the one who made the intricate characters out of sauce, nor was the person who photographed them, but I am the designer who vector outlined everything, and turned said artwork into a fully-functional typeface.  If I knew how to find out how to view the credits of a typeface, I’d totally show off the screengrab my name in them, but for now I’ll just have to settle with the private satisfaction of knowing that this is my work, and that I can also proudly say that I got to legitimately be a contributor to the Arby’s marketing team that is the envy and a shining star of marketing creative throughout the industry.

Few things are more satisfying than working with people you know you work well with and producing creative that I can be proud to say that I had a hand in.

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FREE BEEF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Haven’t done one of these in a while: tractor-trailer hauling live cattle overturns on Interstate 75 in Cobb County, Georgia, liberating several cows that systematically mangled the morning rush to levels worse than usual, until they were corralled and moved to onto the side of the road.  Seven cows did not survive the wreck. 😞

Now I don’t really take lightly the unfortunate deaths of animals, but considering what cows are typically raised for, I think it’s safe to assume that FREE BEEF has just been added to the menu of the buffet spilled across the highways of Georgia.  And frankly considering the typically inhumane ways that animals are put out of their misery before they become food for us mostly worthless humans, dying in a car accident might not be the worst way to go for the bovines lucky enough to escape their eventual destinies.

As I said, it’s been a while, so I don’t even know where to begin searching out my last list of food lost on Georgia roads.  All I can really point out that with fresh beef finally entering the fray, joining chickens and hams, the only meat that has yet to represent on a highway is like some salmon, catfish or some other form of seafood.

But if that day ever comes, then Georgia roads can be the Arby’s of the United States highway system, since they’ll have had, all the meats.

FX’s Atlanta is a sneaky good show

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Atlanta isn’t one of those shows where you can watch the pilot episode and then get on social media and tell all of your internet friends that this show is great, and that you should really watch it.  Like Cobra Kai.  No, Atlanta is the kind of show where you watch it at your own leisure, and you think about every episode for a little bit, and then come to a pretty definitive opinion after pondering about the layers upon layers of each episode.

I just finished season two of Atlanta, and much like finishing up the first season, I had to think about it for a little bit, but my general consensus is that it’s a really good show.  I think the best ways to describe it is that Atlanta is most certainly not the kind of show that’s going to immediately be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those of whom it is, it’s a really good show in that it provokes thought, thinking from alternative perspectives, provides a wealth of situational humor and is pretty well shot from a visual standpoint.  The writing is stellar and gets most of its points across without having to lean on the crutch that most everyone in the show is black and doesn’t really require blacking it up in order to convey the story, except when it’s deliberately trying to so.

I think Atlanta is the kind of show that anyone who liked Netflix’s Master of None would be able to appreciate, except Atlanta is a little more socially acceptable right now since Donald Glover or anyone else in the cast of Atlanta hasn’t yet been accused of sexual harassment.  But both shows come from the modus operandi of having strong, creative writing, serious societal observation and discussion, and plenty of situational humor to keep the mood from getting too preachy.  Both are kind of on a similar level, and in spite of the misconducts of Aziz Ansari, I still really like both shows unapologetically.

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Initial D, fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not a lot of people know this, but Initial D is one of my all-time favorite anime out there.  Easily in my top ten, quite possibly in my top five.  I’ll be the first to say that it’s far from high quality in terms of plot, progression or quality of animation, but when the day is over, there isn’t any other anime that I’ve revisited the status of availability over the span of 18 years, to make sure that I’m caught up to all the episodes.

That’s longer than my interest in Ranma 1/2, Rurouni Kenshin, Kare Kano, Kodomo no Omocha or Neon Genesis Evangelion, all other series that I could say would be up in my top ten.  Not many of them had nearly the longevity of Initial D, much less a variety of movies, OVA and live-action adaptations made for them, in spite of them probably being considered bigger traditional classics.

I recently finished watching the series after I discovered that the Fifth and the Final Stage seasons were available; after the cheesy way that the Fourth Stage had concluded, I was eager to see if the series could get back some of the gearhead excitement that defined the series as a whole.

To no real surprise, the last two seasons were by no means blockbusters, as the series in general is nothing really complex – dudes who love driving cars and racing, racing against other dudes who love driving cars and racing.  The only things that really change are the competitors to the Project D team, and occasionally the course does too.  At first blush, it’s hard to imagine the types of cars that are losing to a Toyota Corolla AE86 or an RX-7 FD3S, but the show surprisingly takes the initiative to explain and justify the mechanics to how such can happen.

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The DeVanzo Shift in an actual MLB game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A guilty pleasure of mine is the film, Artie Lange’s Beer League.  It’s more or less a love letter to all things New Jersey, featuring Artie Lange and a bunch of small time New Jersey losers who enjoy beer league softball in their town while going through the motions of their own mundane lives.  It’s by no means good, but to someone who appreciates sophomoric humor, rec league softball, and one of the random things that Ralph Macchio actually performs in, the flick still holds a place in my well as a go-to for a cheap and reliable laugh.

One of the things in the film that I make references to almost regularly is The DeVanzo Shift, a defensive strategy employed by one of the antagonist teams, designed to feast on the fact that Artie Lange is completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere but the left side of the field, so the Manganelli Fitness team blatantly positions all fielders on the left, leaving the right side completely open.  Naturally, being the underachiever he is, Artie still hits the ball into the teeth of the defense and is easily rendered out.

Throughout the last decade or so, Major League Baseball has gone in the direction of teams employing radical shifts, in order to capitalize on the tendency of more and more hitters to pull the ball more than anything else, because pulling = power, power = homers, and homers = $$$.  It’s become laughably commonplace these days that every team’s left-handed power bats will see shifts where either a second baseman or a shortstop will position themselves pretty much in shallow right field, and be pitched in manners that will try to get them to hit it directly into the shifts.

Regardless, any team that shifts will almost always still have a guy or two position on the opposite side of the field, in the event that a hitter will drop a bunt to counter the shift, or some fluke of a swing slaps a ball to the opposite side of the field.  After all, these are paid professionals who are supposedly the best in the world at baseball and should be able to read a defense and react accordingly to how the opposition is trying to play them.  So shifts are not uncommon in the big leagues, but it’s like we’d ever see a real DeVanzo Shift in the majors.

That is, until Joey Gallo started playing baseball for the Texas Rangers.  Apparently the book is pretty short and concise on Gallo: strikes out a ton, and if he makes contact with the ball, he’s pulling it.  And the Houston Astros have clearly gotten the message, and have basically deployed the DeVanzo Shift, in Major League Baseball.  The Astros positioned nearly every single fielder on the right side of the field, save for left fielder Marwin Gonzalez, who was the sole left-side safety net in the event that Gallo hit anything remotely to the left.  Needless to say, the Astros were very confident that they were going to get Joey Gallo to hit a ball to the right side of the field.

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Only the Mets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not Bobby Bonilla Day yet, but it’s never too early for the Mets to get into the national spotlight for doing something stupid and foolish that only the Mets seem capable of doing and whom the sports media loves to point out their screw ups.  So when the Mets manage to screw up something as simple as batting lineups, and give away a free out because they submit an incorrect batting lineup card to the umpires and opposing team, and subsequently lose the game, it’s newsworthy.

At this point, I’ve watched thousands of baseball games in my life.  I’ve never once seen an instance where a team has managed to bat out of order in a game before.  I mean, I’ve seen blunders on double switches and managers accidentally burn a pinch-hitter or a relief pitcher in critical situations before.  I’ve seen a guy walk on three balls instead of four balls because absolutely nobody from the umpires, players and both teams were paying attention.  But never before have I ever seen a game where a batter went up and took an at-bat out of the predetermined order, and then get caught for it.

I’d say that this is something that only the Mets would seem capable of doing, but seeing as how absolutely everything baseball is recorded, naturally, there’s citation of when this happened last time, and apparently it really wasn’t that long ago when this happened, back in 2016.  But because nobody gives a shit about the Milwaukee Brewers, nobody seems to have noticed when they did it, but because the Mets are notorious for screwing up just about everything there is to screw up in the game of baseball, and the media loves to point out when it does, it becomes news worth talking about.

Seriously though, what stupid shit for the Mets to fall for, and despite the fact that he was kind of a colossal fuck up in Washington, good on Reds manager Jim Riggleman for knowing exactly how to play the situation, and waiting for the precise moment when the Mets were building up some momentum to reveal the blunder, and completely wipe out any positive juju that they were beginning to feel with a runner on second with only one out.  Naturally, the Mets would have to, and did lose the game, in extra innings no less, where had their blunder not occurred, might not have even been on the table.  Who would ever know how things would have played out had the Mets not been so perpetually boneheaded?

Nobody will ever know, but because it’s the Mets, they’d probably find a different way to mess things up and lose, because that’s simply what the franchise seems to do best.

Cobra Kai was good, but can only go downhill from here

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard news about Cobra Kai, I cringed.  The phrases “spin-off” and “reboot” have become so frequent and so often yielding in sub-satisfactory product, that I’ve become somewhat sensitive and triggered whenever I hear them.  Worse, when they’re attached to a property I’ve loved for nearly my entire life, The Karate Kid franchise.  I felt immediate dread and a grave concern that The Karate Kid was next in line to become bastardized by the Hollywood machine that feels the need to bilk and ruin everything that was once successful, in order to attempt to cash in on nostalgia, and feast upon the wallets of the past, in the present.

The pessimistic feelings intensified when I heard that the show had been green lit, and then was actually in production.  And then the press releases emerged with actual drop dates and that it was going to be a YouTube:RedTube exclusive, and the reality started to sink in that this was actually going to happen.  I avoided all teasers and preview trailers, and tried to unsee whenever I caught any glimpses of any promotional materials, because frankly I didn’t want to accept that Cobra Kai was actually going to happen.

A friend of mine began telling me how pumped up he was that the show was coming, and how it was going to get him to actually pay actual money in order to get a RedTube subscription so that he could watch it.  When I said that I didn’t really want to watch it, he called me a hipster that was being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, and that I should be more open minded.  I leveled with him, and told me that if he legitimately thought it was good, then I would give it a chance, but his judgment would be on the line if that were to be the case.

When the show dropped, my friend started texting me about how good it was.  It’s easy to get caught up in the early episodes, but I didn’t want to watch something that was going to disappoint me in the long haul.  The texts kept coming, spoiling some non-essential situational plot points that admittedly intrigued me.  And then the next day, I get a text detailing how tired he was at work, because he had stayed up to just watch the whole series.  Then my brother texts me asking me if I’d started watching yet. 

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