I want to eat at the Midnight Diner

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A show I’ve been enjoying a lot lately has been Netflix’s Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories.  It’s apparent that I’m very favorable to slice of life types of shows, and at just ten episodes that aren’t even a full 30 minutes, it’s the perfect kind of show for me to watch an episode here and there, or watch several in a row, and walk away from the screen feeling moderately pleased with life.   There’s no really other way to describe it other than the fact that it’s a light show that puts me in a good mood while watching it.

There’s one particular episode that I enjoyed a lot, that revolved around the budding relationship between a Japanese physicist and a girl from Korea working in Tokyo, and how their shared love for fried rice omelets is the link that brings them together.  It deals with the taboo perspective of Korean-Japanese relationships, and how easy it is to criticize and pass judgment from the sidelines as opposed to those who are capable of seeing past them.  And all in like 25 minutes, which means the characters are introduced, a conflict is established, and then the episode winds down, giving me more time to do other things, which usually ends up watching another two episodes of Midnight Diner.

Anyway, aside from simply enjoying the show, I look at the Midnight Diner itself, as the kinds of places I love discovering and going to.  And I haven’t even been to Japan.  But anywhere, really, whether it’s in the United States or any other place in the world I’ve visited.  I love charming little eateries, where the cooks are masters of their small menus, and only hit home runs. 

However, when I do visit Tokyo one of these days, I hope like hell I’ll find a place like the Midnight Diner, and it would probably be the highlight of my trip if I actually did find one just like it.  I don’t stay up too late these days, but I’d be more than willing to capitalize on some jet lag and try to find a place open 12-7 am if were anything like the show’s place.

It’s a great show for those who like slice of life anthologies, or just want to watch something very quick, short and relaxing.  I know I’ll be disappointed when I finish the series, and have to go back to the drawing board to find something as simply enjoyable as Midnight Diner.

Instant Pot for the Greater Good

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I joined a cult.

I purchased an Instant Pot.

A little while ago, I stumbled across this particular page, and I was immediately intrigued by the effective photography showing a French dip sandwich, and a hearty looking Italian soup.  As I read through the page, I discovered the existence of this seeming Jesus-level appliance known as an Instant Pot, that was a capable of pressure cooking a wide variety of delicious looking foods in fractions of the times they would normally take if cooked traditionally.

Whole chickens and pot roasts and corned beef in less than an hour?  Just throw shit into the pot, press a few buttons and wait like 15 minutes for the food to cook?  Color me interested.

Anyway, the saturation of Instant Pot on social media and the rest of the internet was no help at resisting the allure of possibly getting one, but the final straw snapped when I just so happened to be out and about bouncing around antique stores, and then I came across this one indy store and I found out that they had actual Instant Pots at reduced costs.

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Content choice paralysis

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I highly doubt it, but I wonder if I’m the only person who goes through this: I sit down to watch some streaming television, and after I open Netflix/Plex/Hulu/WWE Network, I find myself browsing and searching through these gargantuan catalogues of content, and before I know it, 45 minutes have passed, and the time I earmarked to watch some television is mostly gone.  A 60+ minute episode/movie doesn’t really fit into the schedule, and nothing I want to watch is one of those 22 minute shorts.  Ultimately, I end up watching nothing, but have added ten new things to the watchlist that I’ll inevitably ignore in the future and repeat the process all over again.

To say that there’s a wealth of content out there is an understatement.  The catalogues of crap out there are never ending, and the fact that it’s all over the internet reinforces the notion that it can be cycled in and out of circulation at the drop of a hat at any given time of the day, week, month or year.

This is why shows have such short lifespans, because the pressure to immediately succeed is so high, and failing to get an 11 out of 10 often times means cancellation, or falling by the wayside by the next avalanche of programming that’s waiting in the wings at all time. 

Frankly, it’s mind-boggling just how much stuff is out there, and I’m having a really hard time of keeping track of what’s decent, what’s not worth investing time into, and I’m finding that my standards are kind of molding into modern standards, because I’m not giving shows enough time to mature and develop, because they themselves aren’t giving themselves enough time to do such, and begin to suck, and I’m already thinking of what I could be/could have been watching instead.

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I am a fan of teens eating Tide Pods

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The long and the short of such a remark is that it’s simply accelerating Darwinism that the stupid and weak evacuate existence faster than nature may have originally intended to.  I’m not a fan of stupid people, and unfortunately the world is quite overloaded with them anyway.  I’m also not a fan of mercilessly killing people for the sake of reducing the population of unsavory people, but when people croak on account of their own stupidity because they think it’s funny or are so starved for internet attention that they resort to eating laundry detergent, then it’s really out of all of our hands here.

I’m long past writing out the words “just when I thought people couldn’t get any dumber” because I learned a long, long time ago that no matter how low the bar may be lowered to, people will always, always find the ways to make it sink even further.  Frankly, teenagers deliberately staging fake tripping incidents in grocery stores while holding gallons of milk or juice seems like Mensa-caliber compared to people eating Tide Pods.  Or when thousands of people managed to organize and gather… for a Rick & Morty themed chicken nugget sauce that pretty much barely existed, and were ultimately owned by McDonalds when they all had to be told that they didn’t have any; those buffoons seem like MIT’s class of 2020 now.

Frankly, I wasn’t really surprised or concerned when I found out that teenagers eating Tide Pods was a thing recently.  If I think tons of people my age and generation are idiots, it’s a no-brainer that their offspring that’s budding into today’s teenage class are going to be just as stupid, and in this case, somehow manage to be even dumber.  Not only is the risk of ingesting laundry detergent clearly labeled on all packaging, the thought of eating it isn’t remotely appealing or worth the risk in order to get twelve people to see it on social media.

But whatever, if kids want to eat Tide Pods and kill themselves in the process, go ahead and let them. If they’re dumb enough to be doing so in the first place, it’s kind of doing the world a favor and getting them out of the way so that the actual cream of the crop can rise and make something of this wasteland of a world that we’re living in.  I’m not promoting death, but far be it for us to stand in the way of natural selection, and if kids are knowingly swallowing poison on their own volition because it’s what they think will get them attention, then I should switch professions into the funeral industry, because there’s tons of money to be made there for this reason and so many more.

In remembrance of his lord and tormentor Moloch, circa 2018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In a fit of blasphemy, I almost forgot that it was Moloch Day.  Unlike the vast majority of people I know, I no longer have the luxury of having MLK Day off like I did in previous jobs, and had to drag myself into the land of workspaces and get cracking on some work today.

However, a moment of forgetfulness is harmless as long as I still take the time to acknowledge and pour a little bit out in honor of the ancient demon god, Moloch, for whom the third Monday in January is always dedicated to.  And if this is your first time learning of this, worry not, as my site is still down and frankly, zero readers exist, so it’s no surprise that this isn’t getting read.

But my summary from the year prior should be sufficient at getting my point across:

“But anyway, much the same as the ancient Aramaic alphabet came before the Common Tongue, MLK came long, long, long before MLK; which obviously, if you’ve been reading my brog for a while now, obviously is in reference to ancient demon god Moloch, came long before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

In short, MLK Day is Moloch Day, because Moloch came way before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Sure, King was more or less the antithesis of Moloch, on multiple levels, but the law of the world still goes to “who was first.”  And there’s no denying, Moloch has a few hundred centuries over King, and that’s more than adequate reason enough for MLK Day to belong to his holy god of bad shit.

Happy Moloch Day!

Jags-Vikings Super Bowl, let’s do it!

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Not going to lie, I don’t even pay attention to the NFL anymore.  Not because I have some sort of moral stance against all the guys kneeling or anything, and especially not because I don’t like football, quite the contrary, I just happen to like college ranks more than the NFL.  I really don’t have much of a reason for it, except maybe that I’d rather spend my Sundays doing other things than watching NFL games these days, like catching up on the hundreds of television shows or movies I have ear-marked as wanting to watch, or playing video games, or going out and doing things.

Whatever though, in spite of how ambivalent I may have become towards the NFL, there are days like this one where the NFL captures the imagination of everyone who didn’t see it live but watched the replays of the pivotal moment on a litany of outlets and are proclaiming it the greatest play in the history of the game like fucking idiots.  But the Minnesota Vikings pulled off a last-second touchdown play that allowed them to come from behind and beat the New Orleans Saints and advance to the NFC championship, one step away from the Super Bowl.

I understand why people are acting like it was a miracle, because frankly, professional sports are excruciatingly difficult, and to convert a play like that with five seconds left really does take a tremendous amount of luck.  But the reality is that the corner whiffed on the Vikings wideout* worse than the Huffington Post predicting the 2016 election, resulting in a really easy catch and run to the end zone to cause bedlam in Minneapolis.

*not even going to pretend like I know these guys’ names, much less exert the effort to find out

It wasn’t like a miracle, one-handed fingertip catch over three defenders in the end zone, it wasn’t even a hail mary distance.  It really was as simple as a defender blowing his coverage, and the wide receiver getting an easy catch out of it, and scoring on the play.  The fact that it happened with five seconds to go in the fourth quarter with the Vikings behind a score was incidental.

But it was still cool, because shit like this doesn’t happen on a regular basis, much less during the playoffs.  Usually incompetence doesn’t make the playoffs, but as freaks of physical nature football players are these days, they’re often times dumb as bricks inside the noggin.

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Real-life Difficult People

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently I started watching Difficult People; it came recommended to me when I said that I was a big fan of Parks and Recreation.  The parallels to Parks and Rec were that it’s also single-camera shot, Amy Poehler is an executive producer, and one of the co-stars of the show is Billy Eichner, who played Tom Haverford’s flamboyantly intense sommelier in Parks and Rec. 

However, those things aside, I think the comparisons kind of cease, and so far I have to admit that I’m not quite getting into the show as I hoped I would.  Sure, the show shouldn’t be more of the same Parks and Rec formula by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ll admit the last episode I saw (Italian Piñata) was actually really funny, but what it boils down to is the fact that it’s nowhere near as good as Parks and Rec.

The thing is, the show is based on two assholes who go around acting like vapid dicks, living in a sandbox.  Difficult People doesn’t actually go anywhere, and I just recently realized that I’ve been watching the show kind of out of chronological order, but haven’t really noticed, because every episode is self-contained, and it’s just a different story of how Julie and Billy can be shitty people.  This is a far cry from the Parks and Rec formula that had a continuously forward-moving storyline with characters that grew, developed and actually cared about one another.

However, this isn’t a post about how weak Difficult People is, or how much superior Parks and Rec is over every other show (The Good Place, however, is an excellent show, coincidentally created by Michael Schur, one of the founding fathers of Parks and Rec).  What really inspired this post is the fact that I realized that there’s basically a Julie and Billy in my life right now, and that I’m sure lots of people out there have their own variants of Difficult People in their own, whether they realize it or not.

It just so happens to be coincidental that I’ve been watching this show when I came to this realization, and that the people I have in mind are, like Julie and Billy, a loud-mouthed woman and a loud-mouthed gay guy.  And unfortunately, I work with them, so I see them nearly every single working day.

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