Tag: comparison

So many easy jokes about the Mariners repping Nintendo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

LL: Seattle Mariners agree to wear Nintendo Switch 2 patch for the 2025 MLB season

I don’t care enough to dig deep into the finer details, but Nintendo doesn’t own the Mariners like they once did, but they have enough pull with the baseball organization to ensure that throughout the 2025 baseball season, the Mariners will have a sponsorship patch on their away uniforms for the Nintendo Switch 2.  Their home whites will have a regular old Nintendo word mark logo on those alternatively.

Regardless, the jokes write themselves about a company like Nintendo being the uniform sponsor for a baseball organization like the Mariners, because in more ways than one, they operate in similar manners.  Now such could be as the result of the once ownership and the influence Nintendo clearly still has within the Seattle Mariners organization, or maybe they really are two peas in a pod in how their business philosophies are concerned, but the fact of the matter is that there really is a lot in common between both companies.

Nintendo is notoriously Japanese, as in that they are more than happy to operate in a completely risk-averse, efficient manner that prioritizes a zero-waste mentality.  For example, despite the fact that a billion people on the planet wanted the Wii when it first came out, they were all like ehhhh, let’s make just 20 million units, can’t possibly risk there being some false demand and us being stuck with extra units and being forced to sell at a discount.  And for the next several years, nobody could get their hands on one, and they were selling on the resale market at insane markups, and by the time demand was truly fulfilled, the Wii 2 was knocking on the door, and the process kind of repeated itself. The point is, Nintendo prioritizes efficiency and avoiding all risk over possibly making consumers happy and meeting demand a lot closer in which they operate to this day. 

And the Mariners are kind of the same way, because they just, always kind of suck as an MLB franchise, and no matter how much the market changes, how much talent they luck into from their system, and the availability of free agents throughout the years, the organization just somehow manages to always suck at winning baseball games, and much like Nintendo, letting consumers down by taking no risks, avoiding any possibility of dead money by signing no free agents, and routinely letting their fans down on a yearly basis.

It’s funny, because I actually wrote about the Mariners not too long ago and how it’s pretty incredible how much they’ve sucked historically.  Because this is an organization that has had the likes of Ken Griffey, Jr., Randy Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez and a prime Robinson Cano, and in some cases, an overlap of some of these talents. Yet they never won anything, beyond the magical 2001 season where they won 116 games, before crashing out unceremoniously in the playoffs to the Yankees.  They rarely saw the playoffs, didn’t do much once they got there, and no matter the talent that has been on the squad, they just, well suck.

Just recently, the Mariners successfully signed their catcher Cal Raleigh, to an insanely team-friendly deal, six years at just $105M.  The guy is an average 4 WAR player, not even hitting his prime, and could easily have been worth double of this, in just a few years.  But he clearly likes something in Seattle and has agreed to stay there, but the real question is if the Nintendo Mariners will actually do something with this centerpiece, or if it will just be more of the same, operating like Nintendo, where they will only produce the absolute bare minimum in order to be relevant, but absolutely nothing more in order to even attempt to be anything but afloat.

It’s really a chicken and egg situation on whether the Seattle Mariners are operating like Nintendo, or if Nintendo is operating like the Seattle Mariners; but if I’m a betting man, I’d say the former, but either way, neither is a particularly enviable position to be in, because jaded video gamers all resent Nintendo for their Nintendo-ey business practices, and Mariners fans all resent the Mariners for simply never really trying, so ultimately, this sponsorship marriage seems to be a very fitting fit for both parties involved.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: Meet the front runner

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo: Westlake High School senior accepted to 155 colleges, with at least one from every single one of the 50 United States, and has accumulated over $6M in scholarship offers

Welp, just when I was thinking about how Westlake High hadn’t produced a #TRYHARD yet, here they come to join the fray, guns ablaze.  It’s like the school itself doesn’t seem to be concerned about absolutely anything other than raising kids to be fixated and obsessed with applying to as many colleges as humanly possible, so that they the kids and the school can insufferably brag about their success rates, and effectively cockblock a metric fuckton of other kids throughout the country who will be inevitably be put on waiting lists while all these attention hounds make their decisions like they think they’re LeBron James.

But yeah, Georgia teen from the seemingly most notorious college application factory in the nation, 155 acceptances, and $6M in cumulative scholarships so far.  Sounds impressive, but when you do the basic average there, we’re looking at $38K per acceptance.  Sure, it’s not a flat $38K being offered by every single acceptance, but the reality is that some of the higher-tiered schools probably haven’t offered anything remotely close to a full ride, and if a full ride is what chica is looking for, she better be prepared to be going to Florida A&M or Howard, and not any of the Power-5 schools she probably got into. 

And let’s not assume she made any of the Ivies, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about #TRYHARD culture, is that if you’ve been accepted into an Ivy, that name is ensured to be mentioned, early in the article no less.

I had a moment when writing about the last few #TRYHARDs about why I’m taking time to pick on these kids, seeing as how they’re really just trying to get a free ride to whatever college is willing to give them one.  But this queen bee #TRYHARD is a reminder of why I started writing about them in the first place, because it feels like they’re doing what they do for all the wrong reasons, prioritizing attention-seeking and the right to brag and boast ahead of actually giving a fuck about their educations when the opportunity to grasp 15 minutes of internet fame is on the line.

I mean seriously, 155 schools is one thing, but it’s very apparent that the real coup de grace here for this chica is simply the ability to say that she got into a school from every single one of the 50 states.  Because I have a hard time believing that any teen from the southside of Atlanta would have any remote interest in attending a school in Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana or any other flyover state where the mortality rate of black people is probably noticeably lower than it would be in any actual civilized metropolitan area in the country alternatively.  I refuse to believe that there’s actual interest in any schools from any of those remote parts of the country, and that the sole goal was to check off gaining an acceptance in those states.

The University of Alaska, Fairbanks was mentioned as an acceptance, and a quick Google search has them ranked at 635 out of 650 accredited American colleges, so big win there.  Hawaii isn’t mentioned at all, but I’m going to guess that the acceptance from that state is probably along the lines of the University of American Samoa from Better Call Saul, or some other extremely low-difficulty school.

It’s funny when I think about it, because although she got 155 acceptances, I have to wonder how many rejections she got.  That’s one thing that all of these #TRYHARD stories fail to mention, unless they have an abnormally high success rate, and they brag about having gotten into like 50 schools out of 50 applications, but there was no such context here.

And as is often times the case, despite the fact that they might have over 100+ acceptances, in the end, they’re inevitably going to go to some generally low-tier school, mostly because of the fact that the most free-est ride is going to come from there.  And despite the fact that this #TRYHARD wants to become a bigwig pharmacist, her front runner schools are Florida A&M, Howard and THE Ohio State.  There’s nothing wrong with phishing for a free ride, but I do think it sucks for all the kids throughout the country who is put on a waitlist on account of all these attention-seekers just trying to amass acceptances and scholarship dollars.

But anyway, it comes as no surprise that the de facto front runner of #TRYHARDSZN2025 is a kid out of Westlake High, and the bar has been set extremely high now.  It’s going to take some real Ivy League #TRYHARDs to gain some consideration over this one, because 155/$6M is going to be hard to surpass, but it is still extremely early in the #SZN, so never say never.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: Imagine if UGA were your dream school

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lowered expectations: Georgia teen accepted to 60 different schools, amassing $1.3M in cumulative scholarship offers

Another day, another Georgia-based #TRYHARD.  I’m seriously wondering if it’s an IP thing or something or if the vast majority of the #TRYHARDs in the country are all coincidentally just coming out of Georgia, but every single edition of #TRYHARDSZN2025 so far have all been from Georgia.  I doubt that such is going to be a case throughout the whole #SZN, but it is a little head-scratching from the onset.

Anyway, if I had 60 acceptances when I was this kid’s age, I undoubtedly would have had the criteria of being how far away from home, and how much scholarship money are they going to float me, and the best combination of distance from Northern Virginia and how much they’d scholarship me, would be the strongest contenders.

Such, is not the case for this guy, whom although they don’t disclose any of the 60 acceptances he received, the State of Georgia doesn’t have that many colleges and universities in it to constitute close to 60, so I have to imagine that a lot of ideal and acceptable out-of-state, far the fuck away from bumfuck Dublin, Georgia are being left on the table by deciding to go to his dream college of, the University of Georgia.

This reminds me of Terry Jerry-Larry-Garry Gergich from Parks & Rec and how him and his family’s annual vacation was to their favorite place in the world, Muncie, Indiana, which was presumably not that far from fictional Pawnee, Indiana.

Like, the boy has the opportunity to get the fuck out of Georgia, but instead he’s taking his golden tickets and just going two hours north, up to Athens, where his supposed dream school is.

Don’t get me wrong, UGA is a solid school, reputable and moderately respected in the world, but the boy wants to go down a pre-med track, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that UGA is the most qualified school to go to for a guy who’s interested in biology and pre-med.  Just in the SEC, I know that Auburn is a better school for such things, but I can’t imagine the level of education and awareness of the world outside of Laurens County is particularly high.

Either way, I’m already getting tired of writing about #TRYHARDs from Georgia with fairly mediocre numbers in the inevitable grand spectrum of #TRYHARDSZN, so good on this one guy for 60 acceptances and $1M in scholarships, and getting to go to his dream school right up the road, but when the dust settles, there’s already bigger #TRYHARDs and bigger dreams being chased by much bigger overachievers.

#TRYHARDSZN2025: We got a Doogie over here

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

11Aliveonmyside: 13-year old Georgia teenager accepted to his dream college – Morehouse

At first when I read this, my thought was like, Morehouse?  That’s your dream college?  But that was just from the headline alone, the kid’s age wasn’t really mentioned, nor any of the context to why he wants to go to Morehouse seemingly above all others.

But yeah, 13-year old kid, from Conyers.  Now I have a Google alert set for any and all #TRYHARDs regardless of where they’re from, but it seems apparent that Georgia seems to be the #TRYHARD capital of the country, seeing as how out the gate, it’s Georgia 2, everyone else 0 as far as putting #TRYHARDs on the board.

Anyway, Black Doogie over here seems to have an impressive story, being a preemie and how overcoming obstacles early on seemed to set the tone for his overachieving nature throughout his young and diminutive life thus far:

By 9 months old, Joshua was talking; by 18 months, he was reading. At age 3, he wrote his first book.

Joshua has skipped multiple grades, jumping from second to fifth, then to seventh, and later to 11th.

And despite the fact that the initial headline doesn’t seem to indicate that there was any #TRYHARDing in the sense of applying to a gozillion schools, we seem to have it anyway:

At 12 years old, he received over 20 college acceptance letters from institutions such as Miles College, Shaw University, Tennessee State University, and Jackson State University. He is dual-enrolled at Augusta Technical College, completing 27 credit hours with a 3.88 GPA.

All things considered, we have here a tremendous front-runner in this year’s #TRYHARDs considering his age, number of acceptances and current courseload, but we’re not getting any seven-figure cumulative tuitions.  The names of schools aren’t necessarily known for their moneybags, but this is where we say come on, kid’s 13.  If he were 18 and maintained his current trajectory, he’d probably be on Moon University in Outer Space.

However, there is one red-flag in my opinion when it comes to his motivations:

At just 4 years old, he learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attending Morehouse College at 15 and decided he wanted to surpass that milestone. Now, at 13, he has done just that.

To me, there’s an air of wanting to better MLK’s age record for the sake of bettering MLK, and not necessarily because he wants become and starting impacting civil rights as early as humanly possible, and if that’s his motivation for wanting to do such, then there’s something a little ego-centric beyond what MLK’s actual objectives were in comparison.

Either way, the kid is just 13-years old; once he grows up and matures a little bit, and maintains this kind of academic development, the sky and beyond is still the limit, even if it draws the criticism of being a mega #TRYHARD from some randos on the internet.

Welp, absolutely no more reason to favor Southwest over anyone else

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AP: Southwest Airlines ditching bags fly free, eliminating their last real differentiator to competitors

And with the elimination of open seating as of the start of the 2025 season, Southwest Airlines has fully committed to blending into the landscape entirely, leaving them with no more real differentiators from their competition.  Honestly, bags fly free, as small as it seemed in comparison to what they once were as one of the true alternatives in the airline playing field, was still something to consider for airline passengers planning a trip.

Sure, they kind of baked it into their general fares once you did some price shopping against other airlines plus bag fees, but if you played your cards right, Southwest was still a place where you could snag a bargain, if you had the flexibility or willingness to nudge your schedule around.

But with the elimination of bags fly free, it’s apparent that Southwest no longer gives any shits about industry disruption and shaping their brand around being a friendlier alternative to the Deltas, Uniteds and Americans out there that are otherwise crowding the playing field, and prefers to be among the big dogs, raking in profits through a smorgasbord of industry collusion, fare hikes, fees, and general practice of cornering and exasperating consumers into feeling like they have no choice but to shell out in order to accomplish their travel objectives.

It’s funny, because regulation ended in the late 70s, partially so that airline companies could exercise some freedom to be creative, shake up the industry and ultimately strive towards some innovation and likely profit.  But it was done because regulation was choking the industry out with standardized practices, policies, fares and routes, and everyone was basically the same despite operating under different banners.

In the grand spectrum of the airline industry today, regulation might have officially been deregulated in 1978 but make no mistake, regulation really isn’t gone as far as practice goes.  Between all the big dog airlines out there that have a stranglehold on most of the premier routes throughout the country and internationally, they’re all basically the same despite having different names.

They’re all ass-expensive nowadays, have as many taxes and fees as a Ticketmaster transaction, bags don’t fly free and cost an arm, changes at their behest fuck your schedule up, and changes at your behest costs a leg.  They all have shitty customer service, and when the day is over, coordinating airline travel isn’t really that different than coordinating a trip to the movies.  Sometimes we’ll pay the extra and settle on having to deal with a shitty 3-D version of the film solely because the schedule is optimal, and it’s not that different with flying the skies, we’ll go with the airline that fucks us the least and isn’t that terrible for our desired schedules.

In the end, the airline industry really has turned into absolutely nothing more than a game of hubs.  Where smaller airlines squabble and compete over every single customer, the bigger dogs are all trying to gain footholds in regions, because the more regions they can hold higher market share in, the more they’re simply going to win the wars of attrition solely based on routes.

Everyone knows that Atlanta is Delta country, Chicago is where United and American have giant presences, and all of them have smaller hubs across the country.  Southwest seems content to keep their footings in places like Dallas, Baltimore and Phoenix, and instead of trying to keep customers happy or working to be the refreshing alternative to the rest of the market, they’ll probably focus on gaining footing in other markets instead.

Either way, at this point, one change Southwest really should consider is allowing their flights to be searchable on aggregate comparison sites and scrapers like Kayak, Expedia and Travelocity.  I have to imagine it was probably fucking them in the past, voluntarily not being searchable on third-party sites, trying to really push consumers to search directly and save some money, but since they’re no longer trying to compete anymore, they may as well try to bail on this methodology and allow themselves to be searchable on aggregate sites; just like all their competitors do.

The bottom line is that I don’t travel as much as I once did, but I always did like Southwest in that they flew directly from Atlanta to two places I like to be able to get to.  I’m not going to outright blacklist them because that would only hurt myself, but I don’t really have any reason to give them any preferable consideration over any competitors.

And as I’ve said hundreds of times in my life, I miss AirTran, and I still hold a little salt at Southwest for Borg’ing them just to get access to their routes, but then jacking up the fares on said routes to where it’s difficult to consider them more often.

Diamond League is a different game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Much to the detriment of my linguistic aspirations, I admit to getting sucked up into the competitive XP rat race of Duolingo.  My general learning and absorption of knowledge took a hit as I wanted to farm XP as fast and as much as I could so that I could dominate my opponents on the weekly league’s leaderboards, and win, basically nothing for succeeding.  And over the last few weeks, I found myself in a position to where I was finishing in the top-3 every single week, if not winning outright.

After cruising to an easy win in the Obsidian League, the penultimate rank before Diamond, I knew that things were going to be different once I were Diamond, and that I shouldn’t assume I’d be able to get a #1 ranking, not without some genuine effort.  But after one week in Diamond, I’ve come to realize that at this stage of my Duolingo journey, it’s probably not worth competing, unless I happen to be placed into a vastly less competitive user pool, because after a week of actually trying to keep up, I just don’t have the time to commit as the users who bettered me.

The shown graph is my last three weeks, and although it’s not up-to-date, my first week of Diamond was actually my new career-high as far as XP accumulation went.  Whereas my prior two weeks, I notched some 1st place finishes with less XP, once in Diamond, I’ve been shown the realization of just how different of a game it is here.

It really is a blessing in disguise though, because I’ve decided to not try to really compete, unless I see an opportunity.  The good thing is that it never takes long to realize when I’m in a real tryhard group, because like the time I’m writing this, I hadn’t even started for the week, and I was already down 3,000 XP to first place; at my very best, spamming boosts and using gems to extend them, I think I’ve at the most cleared 2,400 XP in a single day. 

Furthermore, I’ve noticed how many people who are the mega-tryhards are utilizing multiple courses, and I get the impression that people are doing this in order to farm XP, because I could just as easily start English and cruise through basic curriculum in order to just boost my numbers.  I’d wager that there are more people like that, than some real polyglots tryharding just to beat others in a meaningless contest.

It will be liberating and probably beneficial to my learning aspirations to take my foot off the XP farming gas, and actually focusing on the content and trying my best to learn and comprehend alternatively.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d still love to win Diamond league one of these days, but I’m already strapped for time as it is, and it’s already sometimes more effort and time sacrifice than I want to make in order to get my generally 45 minutes of lessons in, and I’m already making more mistakes than ever, due to how much I’ve rushed through the curriculum in the last three weeks or so.

My day in the Diamond sun will eventually come, but for now, I’m glad to have quickly learned just how overly-competitive things are at this level, and I’ll bide my time more constructively and take a little more time to learn mi español a little more carefully until it’s go-time.

Daredevil is so good it basically kills all other Marvel content

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like many people, I began to get Marvel fatigue after Avengers: Endgame.  I did my best to stay abreast on the next phase of Marvel content, and I was a fan of how they pivoted into producing television instead of everything having to be all these movies.  I enjoyed WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and even Hawkeye in spite my skepticism that he could be the focal point of his own episodic series.

Ms. Marvel was fun, but by the time Moon Knight released, I was getting to a point where they were just generating so much stuff so quickly, it was beginning to get overwhelming.  Loki was a little reprieve and She-Hulk was light-heartedly refreshing, but it was becoming apparent of what properties were Marvel’s A-tier, and what properties were well, not.

I never saw Shang-Chi, the Marvels, the Eternals or any of the other films that they produced around this time, because the ideas of full-length films and their single-sitting stories seemed antiquated to me, and Black Widow showed just how unnecessary some of the films could be, even with the Marvel production tag slapped on them.

Having kids, life in general and the general evaporation of free time led to me ultimately stop watching Marvel stuff outright, along with a long list of things that would just be added to a queue that I had no idea of when I would ever have the chance to tackle.  However, over the last few months, I’ve made a conceited effort to close the gap a little bit, and have managed to catch back up, having finished Loki, Echo and Agatha All Along.

And it’s a good thing that Echo was a part of this recent catch-up, because events in the show had direct correlation to the one series that I was actually looking tremendously forward to, and the subject of this entire post – Daredevil (:Born Again).

I’ve made it clear that Daredevil is basically the crème of the crop as far as Marvel television goes, and it must chap Disney folks a little bit that Netflix gets to take credit for Daredevil and all adjacent properties that spun from it (Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Punisher, the Defenders), but that’s what they get for not releasing Disney+ sooner.  The writing is strong, the performing, the atmosphere, the grittiness and just sheer execution of all the Netflix shows were all at a bar that no other Disney+ era television shows could touch, and one of the most agonizing periods in time for the company must have been the mandated several year gap in between when Netflix had to forfeit the shows and where Disney+ couldn’t air them, because out of sight, out of mind, and there was always the inherent risk of producing more content, with actors again, growing and conflicting projects.

***[Spoilers Ahead, if you’re somehow less caught up than me]***

However, Disney money runs deep, and the stars seemed to align, one way or the other, and we’ve been blessed with the continuation of the Daredevil-universe.  It was smart of Disney to start making the connection of worlds in Hawkeye, bringing the Kingpin, and sprinkling Charlie Cox into other things to reprise the Daredevil role, in She-Hulk and Spider-Man, and it seemed to time right when they were allowed to drop all the Netflix shows on Disney+ so that anyone who hadn’t gotten to see this brilliant array of shows, while Born Again was being produced.

And now we’re back to the present and Born Again is released, and after the first episode, I’m blown away and taken back to 2016, when I first started watching Daredevil on Netflix.  I had concerns that the show was going to be kind of a reboot from the Netflix series, citing some convoluted continuity issues that writers were too lazy and uncreative to solve, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it more or less picks up from the Netflix age, with some time injected into it, as it should.

Events from Echo have impact on a key character to create immediate tie-in to the greater MCU, but by and large, the show is a continuation of the Netflix series, which is absolutely nothing but a positive in my opinion.  It starts off with a bang, and then it’s basically just kind of picking up from where Netflix left off, but in the same, intense, gritty and strong-written manner.

And all I could think of while watching just the first episode of Born Again, is just how much of a different level this show feels, in comparison to the years of in-comparison mediocre swill that’s been fed to us.  The acting, the writing, the mood and just sheer execution of everything is so good in just a first episode that it basically invalidates just about everything that was been parading around like imposter quality prior to it.  Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio have incredible chemistry, and although Kingpin has been long revived as early as Hawkeye, there’s something about seeing him reunite with Matt Murdock, whom most comic readers know is truly on his Rushmore of opponents.

Going back to the observation of how there’s a clear distinction between Marvel shows that are A-tier and those that aren’t, it really boils down to the point of why a show exists.  If the show is being used to advance some major story points in a grand manner, then it’s probably an A-tier show, like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision and Loki.  However, if the show is being used to introduce a critical concept or character that could potentially be used later, then I would say that they’re not an A-tier show; like how Hawkeye was used to introduce Kate Archer and advance Yelena, Agatha All Along was basically used as a vehicle to bring Billy Maximoff into existence, and Echo was used solely for its plot device on a key Daredevil character.

Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk, as much as I did enjoy watching them, I’d say they’re still glorified vehicles to introduce their titular characters into the MCU, so I’d say that they’re like a B+ tier, more purposeful than Hawkeye, Agatha and Echo, but still kind of fluffy and generally expendable if we’re getting down to business.

And then we have shit like Moon Knight which I have no idea how they’re going to tie into the rest of the MCU.  And Secret Invasion kind of just serves as this conveniently placed retcon device if the MCU ever needs it, and doesn’t actually add much to what was already established in the established existence of the MCU Multiverse or TVA or inevitable Dr. Doom fucking around.

But Daredevil, this is entirely a show and series that can stand alone.  Since it started on Netflix, it was established that it was loosely associated to the MCU, but really never needed to ever touch it again.  The show was set in its own little world in Hell’s Kitchen and thrived as a standalone series, generously bringing a few other properties into the fold.  And the magic is still there with Born Again, and as I’ve said, the general vibe and feeling I get while watching it is that it’s just on such a different level from the rest of Marvel, and I fucking love it.

I could have watched both debut episodes upon release, but with Daylight savings approaching, I opted to not, because additionally, I want to savor the show, because just watching the first episode was a reminder of how long it’s been since the Netflix age, and I don’t to just binge and blow through something that I’d been hoping and waiting to see again for a really long time.  I didn’t realize how much I missed Daredevil until Born Again dropped, and I’m stoked that it’s back, and I hope that it continues on the successes of the Netflix era.