“Bakayarou” is Japanese for “dumbass”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

See also: Shohei Ohtani, who basically tanked all potential earning leverage by showing his hand that he does not want to play on the east coast, thus eliminating the deep, deep pockets of the Yankees, Red Sox or Mets from contention of acquiring his services.

I sure hope he’ll be happy winning no more than 87 games a year for the Seattle Mariners for the next 4-5 years, because that’s pretty much the only team remotely close to checking off of the majority of the lengthy number of prerequisites his camp has provided to MLB teams.

Sure, the current MLB collective bargaining agreement has killed off the days of guys like Daisuke Matsuzaka and Masahiro Tanaka getting Oprah-rich as soon as they arrive in the United States, but it’s still a really stupid move for Ohtani’s camp to so quickly eliminate the biggest spenders from contention, just because their client has some preconceived preferences already in place.  There’s still tons of deferred and hidden money and perks on the table that teams from New York or Boston could have been used for to offer up to create leverage and raise the stakes from other teams.

It’s almost like nobody on Team Ohtani has ever bought a car in their life or something.  You never reveal what your true intentions are, and most certainly never show your hand, until the best possible offers are on the table, and then the next round of negotiations can begin with increased wagers.  Once the best shit is out in the open, the buyers can make up whatever bullshit they want or be as transparent as they want to start revealing their end game, but by then, it doesn’t really matter once the offer sheets are printed and presented.

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Oh, MARTA #100

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, I can’t have entitled this “Oh, MARTA #1,” because I’ve been chronicling MARTA fuck up stories for a few years now, but at the same time, I didn’t feel that this particular incident could just be summed up in the arbitrary numbers that I make up on the fly that make it sound like MARTA fucks up way more often than they actually do although it’s not really that much of a stretch to believe if they did.

So much like they do in comic books or any sort of regular periodical, I figure to just let’s just call this commemorative #100, because it truly was a MARTA incident that can’t simply be recognized with some made-up number.

As the story goes, since it all happened while I was overseas, the long-awaited implosion of the Georgia Dome, as covered by The Weather Channel, had their video feed utterly and completely ruined by a MARTA bus that just so perfectly timed its arrival into the shot right as the initial charges went off and the Georgia Dome came crumbling down.  Usually, I like to believe that I’m capable of coming up with way better headlines and descriptions of events than popular media does, because I don’t have to play by the rules of censorship or any sort of policing.  But when scuttlebutt declared the event as “The most Atlanta thing to ever happen” or something along those lines, I simply had to shake my head and just agree.

Seriously, I can’t really think of something more symbolic of Atlanta than a MARTA bus photobombing a momentous occasion.  And you know the driver had no fucking clue of its actions, as it was probably some wage slave just doing their daily job, trying to keep to the schedule and continuing to move . . . people, routinely through Atlanta.  But to the people at The Weather Channel who were completely banking on this footage, this was a cockblock that not even a Michael Cera film could have possibly executed. 

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I guess I can start winding down Fire Emblem Heroes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I got Hector this morning.  It’s like somewhere in the cosmic karmic connection between life and video games, Fire Emblem Heroes has caught wind of some genuine anxiety, and decided to stop being such a raging mutant cockblock and give me a little bit of a reprieve from the onslaughts of garbage that typically tends to be my luck when it comes to gatcha games.

However, that being said, I guess I can start assuming that the FEH train is probably coming to an end soon.  It’ll end up like Pokemon Go, and start getting lesser support as the developers start looking at the next project on the horizon, and me getting Hector and getting to unleash him on the pleebs is going to mean next to nothing on the near to distant future, because soon nobody will even be playing the game anymore except for like me and my one friend out in Maryland.

Whatever though, I’m still amazed that after all this time, I’ve finally got a Hector of my own now.  It’s only taken the better part of 600 orbs and a special promotional multiplier, but at least I can say that I now have the final piece of my theoretical all-tank team, anchored down by Hector that I’m going to unleash onto the arena and hope it will earn me way more AI wins than any other team I’ve fielded.

In fact, out of my last session of unloading orbs that I’ve hoarded, I actually fared out extremely well.  I ultimately made a total of 40 pulls, and yielded not just Hector, but also 5-star variants of Mia, Lute, Ike, bridal Cordelia and another archer Lyn, two of the more supposed broken characters in the game currently.  Six 5-stars out of 40 pulls actually isn’t that bad, but frankly, I’d have taken trash 39 times as long as I still yielded one Hector, because he’s pretty much the crown jewel unicorn of the game that I’ve been pining to get since I got my bearings on how the game operates.

Obviously this all means that the game is going downhill, but it doesn’t matter to me.  I’m the totem of perseverance, and I play the shit out of all the games that those with more fleeting attention spans abandon as soon as the next new shiny app is released, and with my Hector now in hand, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of future with the game I can have now.

Pokemon Go Fuck the Rules

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Admittedly, one of the things I was really looking forward to on my trip to Seoul was that I would have the opportunity to catch a Farfetch’d in Pokemon Go.  Why am I even still playing this game? is this notable?  Because Farfetch’d is a regional exclusive Pokemon that’s exclusive to Asia, and Pokemon Go wasn’t even allowed in South Korea until literally like two weeks after I had left the fucking country last year.

So the only people who had Farfetch’ds were those who lived in Asian Pokemon Go countries, those who cheated and spoofed their IPs to look like they were in Asian Pokemon Go countries, or tryhards like me that traveled to other countries and actually tried to capitalize on the local Pikachus, wanting to fill their coffers with Pikachus with geostamps listing the places of the world they’ve been to while playing a kids game.

Anyway, during my first morning in Seoul, I went out on a walk because according to the Seoul Pokemon Go Map, I noticed that there was a Farfetch’d within a reasonable walking distance from where I was.  I needed to catch this motherfucker because I really wanted to knock this task off of my list as soon as possible, because I didn’t really want to be the asshole not seeing the world around him, because my face was buried in my phone; the irony of this statement is not lost on me, considering at any given time, 80% of the South Korean population has their faces buried in their phones.

So I get to the location where the Farfetch’d was noted to have spawned, and sure enough it spawned on my phone.  Through bated breath, I unloaded the full arsenal of raspberries and Ultra Pokeballs and hoped that I could catch it and it wouldn’t break free and run away.  It took three tries, but I secured the catch, and then I felt a tremendous amount of satisfaction at getting to be the ultimate tryhard that had just secured a regional exclusive in North America, Europe, and now Asia.

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Forever questions

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The afternoon after I wrote my last post, I got home from work and I went into the backyard with the dog for some routine ball time.  In between throws, I scoured the ground and all the numerous patches of clover, looking for a four-leaf clover.  I know that at my old house, the backyard was rife with four-leafers, but it never took away from the happiness from finding one, with the hopes that somewhere in the world, the magic of the luck of a four-leaf clover could be cashed in, in some capacity.  And given the intensive dread that existed at that time concerning my family, I felt really, really hopeful that I could find just one more four-leaf clover in my new backyard.

I couldn’t.  Even after nearly 45 minutes of looking for a four-leaf clover, there were none to be found in my new house.  Even the dog was tired of running for the ball at that point.  There simply wasn’t one that I could find.

But it’s not that it would have mattered anyways.  About an hour or so later, I received a phone call from my sister, who let me know that her husband, my brother-in-law and father to my niece and nephew had passed away two hours earlier, well before I had begun my search for a four-leaf clover.

Even now, I replay the conversation in my head, and it brings tears to my eyes every time, hearing details of his last moments, and how he seemingly held on just long enough for his kids to make it to the hospital so he could say goodbye to them.  It’s difficult to even type out these words and keep my composure, thinking about it.

The thing is, all this happened right on the day in which my vacation was starting.  My first flight out was just hours away after getting off the phone with my sister, and I felt trapped in this unwinnable bubble that whatever I did was going to be the wrong decision.  Despite the fact that my sister insisted that I go anyway and try to have the best time I could given the circumstances, I still felt like an asshole embarking on an international vacation when someone important to my family had just died.  Sure, I know my sister, and I knew my brother-in-law well enough to know that they’d both have wanted me to go, but it still didn’t entirely feel right.

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Photos: Seoul, Korea / Manila, Philippines Vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: this is a photo dump of the vacation that mythical then-gf and I took to Korea and the Philippines, by virtue of gaming the layover system on a trip to Manila and staying in Seoul as long as possible.

As enjoyable as the trip was overall, it was still a difficult time, as my family was going through a particularly difficult time, culminating with my brother-in-law’s battle with sarcoma coming to an end, just days before the trip.  But still, mythical then-gf and I made the best of our travels, and I did enjoy getting to see Seoul through her eyes, in spite of the blustery cold, and then our brief adventures in Manila, where I lost my phone in an Uber like an idiot, but thankfully got it back, but not before it took a huge dump on one of our sparing days there.

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Life is complicated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I specifically earmarked this particular day to write about how I was about to embark on a vacation back to Korea, with a brief stop in the Philippines, and how excited I was.  It was exciting to be going back to the Motherland, because I had such an amazing time when I went for the first time last year, and I was really pumped up about this time going with mythical gf, since she’s such a Koreeb, and it would be fun to kind of witness the excitement of a first visit through her eyes as well.

This is a trip that had been planned for the better part of the entire 2017 year, where lots of money, planning and more money had gone into nailing down travel and lodging in order to get the optimal prices at the optimal times in order to accommodate both our work schedules and allotted vacation times.  But it was done a long time ago, and since then, it’s always been the constant milestone to look forward to, the thing we’ve been counting down the months, then the weeks, and then the days, up until today, when we eventually embark.

But as its often said, life doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and an infinite number of things exist all around us at any given time.  I don’t really know to segue to it in a smoother transition, but based on the title of this post alone, it should be expected that an unfortunate turn is bound to happen.  But there’s a medical issue in my family and to cut to the chase, there is an uncertainty on the amount of time this person has left. 

As far as I’m concerned, this could not possibly have happened at any worse of a time, but naturally I am not the actual person concerned.  But it doesn’t make it suck any less that a life hangs in the uncertain balance, and I’m in a trapped feeling position of not knowing what I can do, because life isn’t about me, there are others involved, and every choice affects others in a variety of manners.

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