Turds in the pool

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ever since Rito rolled out the League of Legends update signifying the end of season 7 and into the preseason of season 8, things have been a little bit interesting in my gaming observations.  Among the very numerous things that have been changed up, I would have to say that one of the more notable actions was the removal of the level cap, which for the previous eight years had been level 30.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why Riot decided to do such, but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that once 30, many players go off and create alternate (smurf) accounts, so they can either have multiple accounts to play from with ulterior motives, or if they’re actually really good players, climb the ranking ladder with multiple accounts and/or then try to sell them for actual currency.  Either way, they end up diluting the player pool with multiple accounts, and I feel like by removing the level cap, it incentivizes continuous play on one main account, since there’s no more limit to how much the account can level up to.

However, one of the (I feel is like an) unintended result of removing of the level cap is that there’s a mad rush of players suddenly looking for the quickest way to level their accounts beyond 30, so they can have some bragging rights or try and look better than they actually are, by getting their accounts higher than everyone else.  Effectively, when Riot removed the level cap, level 30 became the new level 1 all over again.

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New names don’t always equate to new beginnings

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

File this under “shit nobody but me will really give two shits about” – the fairly, newly formed City of South Fulton has voted on its official name moving forward: Renaissance, Georgia.

I don’t hide the fact that I’m extremely guarded on the internet when it comes to stating anything that discloses my general locations, but I have openly disclosed that my previous place of residence was most definitely on the southern side of the Metropolitan Atlanta area.  I’ve also said that this is a mistake that I vow to never make again, and that I’m confident that I could not even be given money to live down there again, and it would be a safe bet that it would be a snowball’s chance in hell that such ever happens again.

However, despite the fact that I no longer live on the south side, I can’t help but still be somewhat interested in the happening that occur down there.  Sure, most of it is usually crime related or other things that are tragically ironic, but now that I don’t live there, I can witness the things that go down there in something of an anthropological manner, because it really is fascinating to me the sheer disparity in quality of life the south side is privy to compared to just about all other reaches of the Metropolitan area.

One of the hot topics in my fleeting days in the south side was the proposal that the southern chunk of Fulton County, so ironically endeared as simply “South Fulton,” was trying to attain unincorporated city status.  And with just cause too, because it’s about as secret as sexual harassment in Hollywood that the allocation of Fulton County resources was like 65% to the northern half, 25% to the area surrounding the airport, and a paltry 10% towards South Fulton.  South Fulton had the worst infrastructure, the most promises that went broken and unfulfilled, and a general sense that nobody gave a shit about the south end of the county.

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People are fucking dumb

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For reasons completely outside of my comprehension, I’ve come across numerous articles about how people are deliberately smashing and breaking their Keurig machines out of protest for them pulling their ads from some talking head show.

The first thing that comes to my head is: why??

Keurigs are expensive machines.  I love my Keurig.  It allows me to have consistently reliable coffee at the push of a button, and I never have to worry about making too much or too little, and ever since I switched to a reusable pod, the whole wasteful argument from k-cups goes out the window. 

I would never destroy my Keurig because I disagreed with their non-business related views; they’ve already gotten my money, what’s the sense of destroying it out of protest and denying myself future coffee that I rely on and enjoy so much?

Even if I were in a position where I had replacement hardware for my Keurig, and could feasibly destroy my Keurig so I could try and fail to farm attention on social media, I still wouldn’t.  Instead, I could give my old Keurig to someone who might benefit from having one, or better yet, donate it to charity, so I can inflate its value on my taxes and actually make a little bit something back from it.

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Awareness is pointless without action

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I read this interesting article that brought up the topic that if Atlanta’s Jesus Sidewalk AKA the BeltLine, continues to grow without much regulation, then it will effectively re-segregate the city, due to the aggressive gentrification that’s it’s bringing in spades as it churns merrily along.

The funny thing is that this isn’t the first nor will it be the last time articles like this emerge, but it is admittedly one of the more data-driven articles, as it links to a 60+ page case study about the effects and repercussions of the gentrification which is a pretty good read in its own right.

The harsh reality about all this information is that just about everyone paying attention knows this is going on, and no amount of awareness of the situation is going to change the fact that it is happening, will continue to happen, and be a potential reality, because in spite of all of the information, nothing is happening to stop it. 

But that sounds about right as far as the objectives of the BeltLine are concerned – beautify, gentrify, and then profit; repercussions of any failed promises of affordable housing or the guerilla eviction of existing residents can be suppressed and brushed under the rug later, preferably one that exists in the lobby or the ornate dining area of one of the expensive buildings built along it at a later date.

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Writing when it feels like there’s not a lot to write about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like the subject says, I haven’t really felt like there’s been a lot to write about.  It’s times like these when I sit down and try to clear out all the noise in the world and in my head and just see what happens when I open up a Word doc and just start typing.

Usually, I surf a large variety of news sites, local and worldly to see if anything piques my interest.  Then it devolves into sports sites and op-ed outlets, just to see if there’s anything that triggers any sort of writable tangent.  Failing any of that, it’s the happenings in my own fairly ordinary and nondescript life, wondering if there’s anything worth talking about, or anything I actually want to put something down into writing.

My life, hasn’t been particularly interesting for a while.  My days and weeks consist of the same things often, and I’m occasionally fretting over the fact that I feel like I don’t make enough money which kind of puts a damper on some of my ambitions when it comes to things I want to do, or travels I want to indulge in.  I think about spending habits, spending plans and how to shave down the credit card debt that I’ve built back up throughout the moving process, and it frequently feels like an endless cycle that just chews up time and often doesn’t actually pan out like it should.

Like in my current state, I feel like I’d need like 6-8 months to really wipe out a lot of my debt while not having to starve in the process.  I’m sure that some additional sacrifices could be made to reduce my costs a little further, but it just doesn’t feel like it would be enough to warrant the inconveniences.  But really though, 6-8 months?  That’s literally from half to two-thirds of an entire year.  I’m not getting any younger, and the whole concept of getting older is another can of worms that has been on my mind increasingly these days, and I just feel like if I made more money outright, things might improve for the better, overall.

But then I feel like I’m kind of in a rut where my skillset doesn’t command as much money as I hope it would, and I give a lot of contemplation to my own career.  I really like where I work and the team I’m on and the people I work with, but again, money.  I make enough to pay my mortgage and pay my bills, but with the new house, I’m also paying more for a mortgage than I have before, and it’s still an adjustment knowing how much of a larger percentage of my incoming funds are going right back out the door paying for my property.

And we can’t talk about money and not talk about the correlation with time, and then the endless debate of money versus time.  I certainly value my time, and often times more than money, but at the same time, there are certain things that cannot be accomplished without the need for money.  And then it rotates in this perpetual cycle of feeling like I have enough of either, and then I begin to wonder if I may be bordering on the lines of a slight depression.  Which is a maybe.

It would be nice to just win a substantial lottery.  That just might actually make things improve for the better, contrary to the notions that huge influxes of money have accomplished in ruining several people out there.

But really, I can’t really complain that much about my life in some regards.  My life itself isn’t at all terrible, aside from the fairly minor gripes I have that I’m not unaware that there are worse people out there that would love to have my gripes versus their own more substantial issues.

I think I feel like what drags me down is my empathy for others, to where I always feel like the problems of others become problems for me.  I don’t think it’s untrue either, because there are people out there that are close to me going through some rough patches, and I feel helpless that there’s nothing that either I or anyone else can seemingly do about them, and I empathize for their sadness and grief with my own.  Obviously, I won’t get into the business of others, but they are substantial problems, and I’ve come to the realization of the increasing difficulties of life that come with getting older, and that things just might not get better any time soon for the people all around me.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the shitty cesspool of a world we live in, full of rotten corrupt people, politicians, terrorists and mentally deranged people who somehow all seem to have way too large caches of firearms.

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Is Puffy eight years old?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[2020 note]: I just wanted to acknowledge that this was the 2,000th post to my brog. The thought crossed my mind after I had back-filled all of the original brog’s posts, which was roughly 1,620~ posts, so given the fact that I had nearly five years of posts to retroactively post, I knew that eventually I was going to hit the 2,000 post mark.

Naturally, if I were posting in real time, I’d probably have made a dedicated post to the milestone, but instead I thought it’d be entertaining to see where on the roulette wheel 2,000 would end up.

Figures it would be on a fluff post like this one, lol.

That’s actually a rhetorical question; we all know he’s got the social intelligence that of an eight-year old, and the “uhhh i was just kidding guys” excuse is pretty much a prime example of such.

Kidding my ass.  Didds saw the backlash from his dumb little publicity stunt, and from the real Brother Love himself, and immediately backed the fuck off.  I’m really hoping Prichard and/or the WWE had a legal lock on the Brother Love name, and threatened legal action unless he backed off immediately; but knowing the way the WWE works today, I like to believe that Triple H or someone up in the company gave him the opportunity to keep the legal part hush-hush, and in exchange, Puffs will owe the WWE something in the future.

Let’s just say, it won’t be at all surprising if we see Puffy on WWE television in near to distant future, and we’ll probably know why it’s the case.

Either way, Puffs got what he wanted, which was attention, and hopefully now that he’s gotten his fix, he can get back to lording over and producing over those much more talented than him to make decent hip hop.  Hopefully he’ll know in the future not to fuck with the real Brother Love, and at least cross-reference the internet for two seconds before he decides to change his name to something stupid in like five years.

But let the record show that Puff Daddy jobbed to a non-wrestler, in Brother Love.  This is kind of better than Jay-Z jobbing to Diamond Dallas Page.

I hope he ends up like Jay-Z

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For reasons nobody will ever know: Sean-Puff-Diddy-I-Really-Killed-Tupac-and-Biggie changes his name for the 57th time, anointing himself as “Love,” or “Brother Love”

Anyone’s guess is as good as any; but ultimately, I don’t think it’s any stretch to assume that when the day is over, it’s just Diddy’s way of trying to get attention, as if he felt like the news of the world has lulled too long without any news of himself in it, so he does something stupid like changing his name so that people get to talking about him again.  Ironically, I’m writing about it, among countless others, so it’s not entirely a bad tactic, except that the general consensus of scuttlebutt is either along the lines of criticism, or if anything at all, why??

Regardless, to me, this wouldn’t have been even a drip in the bucket if not for the fact that he’s given himself the name of Brother Love on top of just ‘Love.’  Because to wrestling-loving nerds like myself, there’s only one person in the world synonymous with the name Brother Love – the red-faced, white suit wearing, original manager of the Undertaker, Brother Love, portrayed by Bruce Pritchard.

I think it’s a safe bet to assume that Diddy didn’t bother to check for any overlap, or any conflicts of similarity, because he’s an insufferable attention whore that doesn’t really think before he acts, but I’m agitated that he took the namesake of an iconic personality, whether or not he knew of his existence or not.  I mean sure, professional wrestling is pretty silly, but it’s also not an invisible niche industry, and Pritchard himself works for the largest, publicly traded wrestling company on the planet, so it’s not like he’s one of the no-name scrubs in the world using the moniker of Brother Love.

Continue reading “I hope he ends up like Jay-Z” →