The sexy, red-haired, rain making elephant in the room

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every Worlds, there’s always a not-popular/meta champion pick that emerges from some team, usually from Korea, that takes the tournament by storm, or is effective enough to surprise out some critical victories.  Sometimes they’re picked against lesser opponents so that players can hide their hands and not reveal their A-games to those stronger challengers scouting in the wings, or sometimes they’re busted out at a critical juncture of a series to catch the opponent off guard, and by the time they understand what is happening it’s too late.

Every year, there’s always one or a few picks that are remembered for its breaking of the meta, and outside the box thinking, or sometimes just plain goofy audacity, that sometimes works because nobody is expecting it.  In Season 3, OMG’s LoveLing bust out a jungle Volibear that completely blindsided TSM en route to a 43-13 drubbing.  In the Season 4 Finals, Royal Club’s inSec selected Rammus to jungle, and although his line score didn’t look that impressive, he most definitely contributed to Royal’s only win before ultimately succumbing to Samsung White.  And then there was last season SK Telecom T1’s Faker going all the way to Jupiter to select Olaf to play in mid lane (link above), and then still throttling a completely lost Bangkok Titans squad who inexplicably tried to go bruiser-vs-bruiser against Faker by picking Irelia mid.

It’s a legit strategy when it comes to League of Legends, since there are just so many available champions to pick from.  No matter how infallible or statistically reliable some champions are, out of 150+ available, there’s going to be one that’s an effective counter somewhere.  And the players that hide them in their hands until critical points are legit risk takers, choosing to unleash them when the stakes are high.

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Another Wolverine movie and the sky is also blue

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Man, FOX is really milking their Wolverine hard-on all the way to the end, huh?  I think I’m more surprised that Hugh Jackman is completely okay reprising Wolverine for the ninth time with Logan, but I guess he really likes money and is completely okay with being typecast as Wolverine for the rest of eternity, no matter what else he does with his career.

Seriously though, Jackman has shown up in literally every single The Wolverine Show Movie Occasionally co-starring the X-Men, and just about every single one of them revolves around him.  Aren’t the fans tired of the character being ret-conned over and over again?

Wolverine hijacks all three of the original X-Men films, gets his own origin film, then his own stand-alone film.  He makes a cameo in First Class, before being thrust back into the spotlight in Days of Future Past, which I’m convinced existed solely to reset the Wolverine timeline so more Wolverine and Wolverine-centric films can be produced.  This is confirmed with his cameo in Apocalypse that takes him straight back to Weapon X.  And now Logan will be Wolverine in the far future.

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This is me lately

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Minus the caffeine pill addiction, but it’s how I feel way more often than naught.

I have a lot of things that I feel I need to do: edit down nearly 2,000 pictures from Europe and Korea.  Write about experiences in Korea.  Build a prop.  Take care of household chores, like replacing the kitchen light and paring down the shrubs.  Write some more, about random, inane things for a brog that’s been down since fucking April, that nobody will see until I migrate my site.  Clean my house, so that I can someday sell my house.  I need a haircut.

So what do I do?  Write about how I feel like I don’t have enough time, or any time, instead.

In my defense, I am currently not in a place where I can do much of my self-imposed workload, although I could write about Korea but I was there for two weeks how can i parse it all down to a few words???

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Love it but hate it

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Impetus: Nintendo reveals Switch, the gaming console that allows you to play games handheld as well as on television

The technology behind this is truly game breaking.  I’m very much in awe at Nintendo’s ambitions and forward thinking when it comes to the gaming industry.  Microsoft and Sony aren’t even remotely in the same stratosphere when it comes to competing with Nintendo visions, because they’re too busy fighting each other, churning out products that require a hundred updates a week with a video game occasionally playable.

I’d love to read or hear about the creative concepting behind Switch; and the moments when they realized that it wasn’t impossible to feasibly create something that could be played on televisions as well as through handheld capacity.  On top of that, it’s designed to be a very social gaming system, that allows for lots of multiplayers, as long as controllers are available.  It probably was something really inspirational to be a part of.

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When will I learn

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That my time is occasionally more important than many things?  Like an ill-informed opportunity to meet Ron Swanson.

Earlier in the week, I saw plug on a local website for An Evening With Nick Offerman, I guess a touring appearance circuit in order to push Nick Offerman’s newest woodworking book Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop.  I thought to myself, this is something that intrigues me, getting to see and meet Ron Swanson.  I hadn’t learned about this event until after it had passed, like most other cool occurrences throughout the city, and being held at Georgia Tech, it wasn’t in an inconvenient location. 

However, I have a lot of things that I need to do, and some things actually have a short window in which I need to complete them.  But as a diehard Parks and Rec fan, especially of Ron Swanson, it seemed like an opportunity that I shouldn’t let pass.

I decided to go.

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Korea Stories: Random Observations

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The following is more or less going to be a list of random observations I made while in Korea that didn’t really fit into the mold of any one chunk of posts.  That being said, it’s also indicative that I’m pretty much at the end of the rope when it comes to writing about my experiences in Korea.

Internet is as good as you’ve probably heard: When you use the internet in Korea, coming back to America and using my Comcast “high-speed” service that I pay a premium penny for on a monthly basis feels like going from a jet to a Ford Festiva.  Wi-fi, at a public hotel, with many users concurrently connected, was still pulling 60 down and 60 up, speeds that rival my own private connection, hard-wired.  And it was like that everywhere I went; I know, because out of curiosity, I was running the SpeedTest app just to see how good Korean internet speeds were.

Cabs are dirt cheap.  I was often doing math in my head while in Korea in regards to trying to find the USD equivalent of everything I was spending.  It’s easiest to round up or down, to where it’s a 1 to 1,000 when converting a dollar to Korean Won, so basically chopping off the last three digits was the easiest to rationalize the dollar amount of things.  I rode in a lot of cabs, because after the amount I was walking, sometimes I just didn’t want to hoof it for more miles to get to the nearest train station.  But whereas in the States, a cab ride for just a few blocks easily ticks its way to $10 and up, I was baffled to see how often times a cab ride for a considerable distance, often started at roughly $3, and only once did I spend more than $10 on a cab ride, and that was a good distance.

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Photos: Korea Trip 2016, batch 4

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[2020 note] These are unposted photos from 2016, the fourth of four galleries of my first-ever trip to the Motherland, that I took with my mother.

The tour group concluded with a trip to Seoraksan (Mount Seorak) before it was back to Seoul, where my mom and I settled into another AirBnB for the last few days of our trip.

Admittedly, as much as I loved my time in Seoul, I really was feeling like I had begun to see a lot of the city and having done countless hours wandering and seeing shopping center after shopping center, I was ready to go home.

Hilariously, my mom reached out to some other old friends in the area, and extended her own stay for another two weeks, but I was most definitely ready to head back to the states.  It was an unforgettable first-time in Korea, and I have nothing but great memories and appreciation for seeing my culture in its native land.

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