Tag: motherland

돈ball

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Made in Korea: it’s discovered that talent in the Korean Basketball League have developed a system of converting high percentages of free throws across the league – the bank shot

Let me tell y’all just how much I love this story.  Most of my zero readers probably know just how much of a fan of Tim Duncan I was, with a large part of it being his reliance on the bank shot, so it should come as absolutely no surprise that this story gets me pumped up like nothing else, more so because it’s coming out of Korea.

Frankly, the only reason why bank shots are not utilized more in the most popular variants of basketball in Europe and America is simply the fact that “it’s not pretty” and is universally accepted as such, as if using the glass makes a basket count for less points.  A three-pointer is still worth three points whether it’s a high-arcing rainbow swish or a flat, zero spin clunk-clunk off of the glass.

But honestly this isn’t something that should be any surprise, because whether it’s a corner jumper from the wing, or from the free throw line, bank shots are designed to be high-percentage by utilizing geometry and physics to optimally a basketball through a hoop as safely and optimally as possible. 

Korea is obviously no powerhouse when it comes to the sport of basketball globally, but regardless, every Korean boy grows up thinking he can hoop and make it to the NBA.  Despite my dumpy prepubescent stature before hit my teenage years, there was no sport I loved more than basketball and I’m confident to say that I had a pretty decent jumper throughout the years in which I played a lot, but the point is basketball is still a distant runner-up when compared to the presence of baseball, soccer and even esports nationally.

That being said, with such low-presence, good for the Koreans for putting aside silly biases like the need to be aesthetic in exchange for improved efficiency and higher accuracy when it comes to shooting free throws.  And I love that they’ve found so much success with banking home a ton of free throws to the point where it’s gotten global attention, and opening up for discussion the validity of the technique, which of course, is best summed up with, why the fuck NOT consider the possibility of having struggling shooters try the bank out, especially if what they’re doing isn’t working?

I’ve touched on it before, but Shaq could have easily, easily eclipsed the vaunted 30,000 point milestone, had he been even just 5% better at shooting free throws in his career.  Here’s a guy that most definitely should have tried the glass at some point in his career, instead of chunking up the bricks that only went into the hoop at a career 54%.

And even LeBron James, as good as he, he’s still a career 73% free throw shooter; had he been able to reach even the 80% clip that both Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant both exceeded, he would’ve passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring record nearly two seasons sooner.

I don’t disagree, bank shots aren’t pretty.  They’re ugly to watch, the clunk-clunk sound they make is goofy, and the way they explode the net and hang for a second before they fall through is unsightly.  Who doesn’t love the nice wet swish of a perfect shot, or when a Steph Curry bomb just pings the bottom of the back of the rim and barely moves the net at all?

I most certainly do, but there is one thing that I like more – scoring a lot of points.  And if an aversion to the glass solely because it’s just not as pretty is the only thing that stops me from scoring MJ points and keeps me in Jeff Hornacek scoring territory, I’m going to the bank seven days a week.

Like in so many walks of life, y’all can learn a lot from Korea.  It’s a culture obsessed with identifying ways to be more efficient, and it should come as zero surprise that they found and are exploiting a massive efficiency in the game of basketball, simply by sacrificing aesthetics for accuracy.  Because especially now and until the end of time, I don’t think there’s going to ever be another Mark Price who had both, the sweet shot and the deadeye accuracy at the stripe, so may as well start getting good at using the glass if we want to start evolving the game.

I feel like I sacrifice more than an Ultimate Warrior promo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With a post title like this, one might think that this was going to be yet another whiny, my-life-is-difficult diatribe where it can be assumed that I’m in a foul mood of some sort.  The thing is, I’m actually not in a particularly bad mood or anything, but it is just something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I just felt like typing out some words to see if anything comes to fruition, as that’s something the brog has served for me occasionally throughout the literal decades.

But to get to the point, I feel as if the vast majority of my life these days is spent making sacrifices all the time.  I don’t drive my own car into work most of the time, because my car is the big safe dadmobile with the childrens’ seats already set up in them, and it’s left with my au pair so that she can drop off and pick up my children from pre-K.  I drive our third car, which has served me fine, but it is older, needs more care, and lacks some of the conveniences that my own car provides.

At home, I no longer have an office or a space of my own because of our choice to employ an au pair, which is no knock on them, as I still consider it one of the best decisions we made as parents, and one that I would easily recommend to other parents of young children.  But the point remains, when the house gets crowded, or I feel the want or need to just go somewhere in my own house to hide out and take a breath in, I don’t always have such a reprieve.  This was exacerbated numerous times over the last few weeks with several house guests, and I found myself in a position where I just wanted a little bit of privacy and couldn’t have it.

Most of the time however though, are the sacrifices of my time and general self I feel that I make, and I sometimes ponder if I’m doing it too much.  I basically have no hobbies left because I don’t have time for them because my weekdays are all spent working, parenting and then I have like 3-4 hours a night “off” which doesn’t account of the time it takes to clean up after the kids, reset the house, and prepare a litany of things for the following day, so I really have like two hours a night in which I’m truly free to be off and relax, but not without a clock over my head knowing that I have to sleep at a sensible time, so often times I don’t do anything that substantial or the things I want to commit meaningful time to because two hours a night just doesn’t cut it.

On our most recent “vacation” I sacrificed myself to ensure that our au pair could get to experience some things about Disney World, since it is important to me that she gets to actually live some semblance of life while here, and not just be a nanny to the kids, but what it results in is me taking kid duty and ultimately not getting to really do anything that I might want to do, not that I could think of anything I’d want to do in Disney World anymore these days.

The point is, I feel like I’m always in a state of constant sacrifice that I don’t really know where I’m generally at with my life anymore.  All I want is just a single day in which I can sleep in and not have to be the first one up, preparing breakfast, preparing everything, dealing with the girls’ cranky morning tantrums, and have some substantial time to myself.  It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I haven’t found myself in a position to be able to enjoy such considerations in quite some time, and I’m pretty sure the last time I was able to take some time off, was when I hopped on a plane to go to Texas to visit my brother.  But opportunities like that are few and far between, because I’m financially strapped because I’m always sacrificing everything I make to try to support a lifestyle that might be a little too extravagant for my personal preference.

I read a book not long ago about a half-Korean girl dealing with the passing of her mother to cancer.  Piggybacking off my prior post about crying, I think I was drawn to this book because I knew it was going to be a real tear-jerker and I was seeking out something to help burst my dams, but it was still a good read.  But one of the takeaways from the book, and I’m sure it was really meant to be sage wisdom passed down from a Korean mother to her daughter, but I feel like it could apply to a Korean man like me, was that far too often, there are people who give 100% of themselves to their families.  Such is not necessarily a bad thing, especially at the ages of my children, they need everything I can give to them, but her wisdom was to hold back 10% of one’s selves, and keep it for ourselves.

That stuck with me, because I feel like I’m currently living a life where I’m constantly giving 100% to my family, but in doing so, I’m completely devoid of having absolutely anything for myself.  Recently, I’m trying to look for ways to try and gain back any percentage of myself, and even if I succeed, I highly doubt that I’ll be able to get up to 10%.  I guess I’m just such a sacrifice-er, that if I can get to like 5% of myself back, that should be considered a win.

I tried to treat myself to a new pair of shoes; but like so many indulgences in the world, whenever I find something that I might like, it turns out to be what everyone else tends to like, and the specific shoes that I decided I want a pair of, apparently, they’re so hard to get a hold of, that when Foot Locker gets a new shipment of them in, they’re basically treated like an online queue lottery system that everyone has to fight over, and only the lucky ping lottery winners actually get an opportunity to get.  Seriously, I made it through the virtual queue in three minutes, but my size was apparently already sold out, and within ten minutes, they were sold out of all sizes, presumably because of re-sellers and StockX pirates just grabbing anything they can get their hands on.

So, so much for trying to get any semblance of any % back for myself in that regard, back to the drawing board.  But the bottom line is that I just need to stop sacrificing 100% of myself, and find little ways to keep semblances of me, for myself, otherwise I end up as, well, this.  An angsty, emotionally volatile, usually irritable and mad, deep-fried burnt out dad.

I feel like we’ve seen this before

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Déjà vu: South Korea denies Germany opportunity to advance to the knockout stage in the World Cup with 1-1 draw

Shoutout to the South Korean women’s World Cup squad for doing basically the exact same thing that the men’s squad did in 2018.  Despite lackluster, uninspiring performances in their first two groups matches and in spite of being paired up against powerhouse Germany in their final groups match, they kept their heads help up high and played out of their minds, and in the process, cockblocked Germany from advancing to the knockout stage.

I’m not going to pretend like I follow women’s futbol on the regular, but I am often curious to see how the US women do, because I do enjoy the train of US women futbol players shouldn’t get equal pay to their men counterparts, because frankly I think they should get more, seeing as how they’re usually way more successful on the global stage than the boys are.  And when you have a global stage, I’ve always got an ear open to see how Korea is doing, if they’re even present at all.

When I saw that the Korean women had dropped their first two matches, I had this dread that the squad was going to exit the tournament without having scored a single goal, which would be pretty embarrassing.  I didn’t really think that a repeat of the 2018 men’s tournament was a chance, since I didn’t think there was any way that a country as proud and futbol-centric as Germany would allow for it to happen.

But unlike the men’s match that took 94 minutes to drive a knife into the hearts of Germany, the women apparently only needed just four minutes, when 조소현 scored a goal, putting the instant pressure on the Germans to not only have to equalize, but score at least two, in order to have a chance at gaining enough points in order to move on.  To add insult to injury, concurrently, Morocco scored on Columbia to tip the point scale even further for Germany, and despite them equalizing with Korea, the 1-1 tie at the end wasn’t enough to secure passage into the knockout stage, and what we have is that once again, Koreans sent Germany packing from the World Cup. 

They might have performed poorly throughout the tournament, but at least they finished strong, much like their male counterparts five years prior, left the World Cup on a high note.

At Germany’s expense.  lol’d

O pilsung corea, motherfuckers

Oh, to be 39 again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had no idea this was even a thing: South Korea to abandon their own age-counting systems and standardize to the rest of the world

In all fairness, it sounds like most of Korea was already in line with the rest of the world, but it’s funny to think that there are segments of the culture that still used the antiquated counting systems of olden times, and are retroactively going back in age 1-2 years. 

I had no idea these alternate ideologies of counting age even existed in Korea or anywhere else, but the whole idea of gaining a year solely for the sake of hitting January 1 for the first time in their life is pretty hilarious.  By that logic, since my sister has a December birthday, she’d have been two years old after like days of existence outside of the womb.

Obviously, it’s very easy to see why the country is abandoning it across the board now, because it really does seem absurd in those select cases.  But it’s still funny to imagine the reality that around the country, there are legitimately people who are being able to proclaim that they’re suddenly up to two years younger.

I imagine most of those people are probably of older generations and higher ages, but it’s funny to imagine that if it were still in play for some of the younger demographics, and the repercussions of being rewound.  Like being 19 and able to drink, to suddenly being corrected back to 17 and you’re now a minor and can’t legally drink anymore.

But the more impactful scenario are the men who are in the 28-29 age range and have been avoiding enlisting for their mandatory two years of military service.  People can now postpone 1-2 more years and maybe dodgers who are 30 and 31 and did some jail time for it, are suddenly back to being 28-29 and eligible to enlist, would they receive any sort of pardon or reparation?

K-Pop stars and athletes and eSports stars are suddenly younger out of the blue, and in great examples of mind over matter, the former prodigies that are now “old” at 17 are suddenly 15 again, and are considered high-ceiling prospects, but unable to recapture the talent of their pre-teen ages, because they’ve already mentally resigned themselves to being old.

And then there’s me, oh how I’d love to be able to proclaim being two years younger, just to be able to say that I’m not in my 40s again.  But then again, I wouldn’t be able to make the same age jokes between mythical wife and myself, and I’d have to go through the torment and turmoil of coming to grips that I’m entering my 40s for the second time now.  I may even cross the line of definition between an elder millennial and a plain regular pleeb one, depending on interpretation.

But at least for a year and change, I could say that I was back in my 30s, and although it wouldn’t change anything really for me, it’d be nice to know that I had successfully and legitimately turned the clock back.  Might make for interesting brog content potentially.

5 associate degrees? Why no bachelor??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sauce: 12-year old California tryhard kid graduates from community college with five associates degrees

It seems like every single year, people get more and more competitive about academic achievements, but to a degree where it’s not actually cool anymore, and just kind of attention seeking and insufferable.  And the internet doesn’t help, as there are countless platforms for these tryhards to flex and humblebrag about the things they’re accomplishing; don’t get me wrong, it’s great that people are flexing something useful like educations, but if they’re only doing it for the sake of getting people to sing their praises then it’s really no different than inventing an obnoxious viral dance or something.

Here in Atlanta, every year, my old neighborhood’s Nextdoor feed has become this escalating pissing contest of parents sharing stories or flexing their kids’ accomplishments of how many acceptances and how much scholarship dollars the local high school graduates are.  It has literally escalated every year, and for every person who loves to proclaim their kid got into every single Ivy League school and has amassed over $1M in scholarship offers, there’s two other kids who have been accepted into 20+ schools and has totaled over $2M in scholarship offers.  And the ships sail endlessly as people resort to internet passivity to vent before someone inevitably says can’t we all just get along???

Obviously, this behavior is not exclusive to Atlanta, and throughout the years, we’ve seen all sorts of tryhards who have turned educational achievements into sport itself, and all across the country there are people who are always trying to out-do and one-up everyone else with college acceptances, scholarship values, how many degrees, youngest to do something, oldest to accomplish X, etc, etc.

But shoutout to this 12-year out in California who managed to notch his fifth associates degree from Fullerton College, which sounds and is kind of impressive in its own right, seeing as how he’s only 12.  But then the low hanging fruit of jokes channels my inevitable becoming a high-expectations Asian dad, and wondering why his Asian parents seem to be okay with him taking a victory lap on the internet when all he’s accomplished were a handful of associates degrees.

Not even bachelor’s degrees!  WTF?

Of course, regardless of the snarky shade, he’s still set up perfectly to transition into actual college eventually, and I’m imagining that a large part of this game is to be able to transfer the evident butt ton of credits that he’s amassed from community college into an actual bachelor’s program, and he’ll still inevitably graduate from a real college well before he’s 18.

But the thing is that his motivation for embarking on such a tryhard path really wasn’t so much the fact that he wanted to learn faster and reach adulthood in a better place than most, as much as he heard that some 13-year old had done it, and he wanted to match or exceed them.  So it’s like, did he really, learn anything, as much as he checked off boxes and requirements for degrees, so he could beat someone else, or was he just basically trying to speed run through community college in order to have bragging rights?

Regardless, it’s all way too tryhard, way too obnoxious, and frankly a disservice to parenthood and raising a child in my opinion.  The boy probably has no friends and no social skills from being either taught at home by Asian parents or being surrounded by much older teens and young adults all through his college journey, and even if he is the wunderkind, when there’s no more school to be had, will probably end up as a sad sack adult with a whole lot of catching up with living amongst human beings, all because he and his family were caught up with trying to better someone else instead of bettering their kid.

When my kids are nine-years old, I’m hoping they’re finishing up the third grade, and have friends and peers their own age.  If they’re smarter than the curve, we’ll assess how to challenge them appropriately, but I’m pretty sure sending either my kids off to community college probably isn’t going to be on the table.  Meanwhile, by then, this tryhard kid will probably be 18 with a college degree, and completely incapable of getting a job, because he will be a social skill invalid, have no ability to interview or interact with other human beings, and end up working at his parents’ business whatever, stereotypical Asian one they’re in.

When you try hard, you die hard.

I’ll tell you how I’m going to become rich

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My sister made a recommendation to our family group chat about a film she saw; Happy Cleaners on Amazon Prime Video.  Just from the title alone and given the context of my very Korean family, I knew that this was definitely going to be about the Korean Story, and that it was going to fuck with my emotions.  I watched the trailer and yup, it was about the Korean Story and the trailer alone did succeed at fucking with my emotions.

Make no mistake, in spite of the title of the film, this was going to be anything but happy.  I anticipated that like so many Korean stories, this was going to be depressing, thought-provoking, probably relatable and leave me feeling like I’ll probably want to cry from having my emotional heartstrings yanked around.  Sounds like a great idea to watch right?

But because I’m a sucker for my nationality, I went ahead and watched it anyway, in spite of all the red flags of getting aboard an emotional roller coaster.

And of course, Happy Cleaners was everything I anticipated it would be, and I ended the film in a lower emotional state than which I started at.  Not only was it about an entirely too relatable Korean family much like my own, the plot of the film doesn’t really have much lateral movement, and unsurprisingly starts depressing, and ends in a more depressing state than the beginning.

To make matters worse, there’s a character in the film who’s named Danny, and he’s a Korean-American who has the weight of the world on his shoulders to the point where he can’t achieve any objectives and is working two menial jobs in order to survive.  He’s a classic underachiever, and I’m triggered because after just watching Beef, whose main character is also an underachieving struggling Korean-American named Danny, I feel like the world is trying to tell me something unpleasant.

Frankly, as much as I want to support Asians and specifically Korean or Korean-American filmmakers and storytellers, I’m just kind of over everyone’s rendition of the Korean Story.  Yes, Korean immigrants have historically had it really poor throughout the passage of time, but in most cases in everywhere in the world, when people immigrate to other countries, they’re usually going to struggle unless they learn the native language and/or get the education of the country they’re moving to. 

In most cases of the Korean Story, Korean immigrants get straight to work after arrival, seldom really try to become fluent in English, don’t bother getting an American education, and put all of their eggs and pressure onto their kids to succeed, and there just ain’t that much need for one million Korean doctors or lawyers and there aren’t that many scholarships to be had at all of the Ivy League schools combined.  Instead we’ve got hundreds to thousands of Korean storytellers all telling the same stories of their family’s struggles of surviving in America, with minimal variation.

So I’ll tell you all how I’m going to make my fortune: by writing the Korean story that isn’t the Korean Story.  Even if it’s fictitious and unrelatable to the 1.7 million Koreans in America, maybe it can just be a good exercise in escapism for all of us instead of needing yet another film of book or television special about how Korean lives suck in America.  It won’t be as exploitatively parodying like fucking Kim’s Convenience, and it wouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Happy Cleaners or Beef.

It can just be a story about a Korean family that succeeds at coming to America, embarking on and succeeding at achieving their American dream.  By learning English, re-learning an American education, and breaking out of the mold of working at liquor stores or dry cleaners or shitty food franchises, they become contributing members of society not completely insulated in their cultural silo.  Their kids grow up without the pressures of their entire bloodline on their shoulders, and they too become successful adults who are both well-cultured and well-educated and succeed in life.

Surely this narrative has happened somewhere in the culture, but without the angst of feeling cursed by the Korean Story, those that live it probably just haven’t gotten around to writing it out to where it could become a piece of Korean media that doesn’t make me want to jump off a bridge.

So I should just do it myself.  I’m sure I’d become filthy rich from all the Koreans who want to seek that escapism, and I’ll know I really made it if I could then get all the white guilters to get on board with it and ingest my story so that they can seem tolerant of foreigners, and then the rest will follow suite like dominoes.

Just got to have time away from parenting to get right on that though, so I guess in about 5-6 years I can pursue my destiny, hopefully.

Beef: Great show, hits a little too hard for me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw a trailer for Netflix’s Beef, I didn’t know much else about the plot other than the fact that the general introduction to the plot was two people having a chance road rage encounter, and it supposedly escalating to comedic hijinks.  But now that I’m finished with the show, yes, the general boiled down plot of it does remain similar to the early perception of what the show could’ve been, but it was also way more complex, way more substantial, way more important for Asian representation on camera, and most notably, way more relatable to Asians, to admittedly uncomfortable levels at times.

Don’t get me wrong, as a whole, I loved Beef.  It was a fantastic show.  But at the same time, it dove into some topics and had dialogue and situations where it kind of mind-fucked me at just how targeted this felt, beyond the fact that the male lead’s name is Danny and he’s Korean, but obviously I know I’m far from the only person much less Asian person who probably deals with a lot of these thoughts, emotions and struggles to where a plot like this can probably impact a lot of people out there.

Aside from the praise for the strong writing and the strong performing of all actors in the show, one thing that I appreciated the most about the show is just how casually but impactfully demolishes the door of Asian stereotypes in film and television, on a global basis.  Koreans in media in both Korea and America are often set to a lot of unwritten rules and guidelines, like when it comes to physical intimacy, sex and dialogue.  When I was growing up and seeing Korean shows or dramas that my mom or grandma would watch, and seeing any sort of meaningful relationships much less physical intimacy just didn’t happen.

As countless American articles have called out, Asian representation in American media is even worse, and Asian men get it the worst, being emasculated left and right, causing generations of Americans to see Asian men as a bunch of auto-cuckold wimps by default.

Beef just goes on like none of the old rules or bars ever existed, and it’s a breath of fresh air to see people, regardless of race, acting like the people of today would conduct themselves.  Danny is allowed to be emotional, introspective and have flaws.  Amy is allowed to be a breadwinner, the alpha in her marriage and stand up to men fearlessly.  Paul is allowed to be sexy and naïve, and I’m glad to see him fight the good fight to hopefully paint Korean men as anything other than either overweight comic sidekick, or a plastic-molded K-pop boy band member.

AND THERE’S FUCKING SEX in the show, involving Asian people, and it’s not like a sensual love making scene to IU singing in the background.  It’s emotional and raw and actual fucking like you’d see in real American media between non-Asian people.  I’m not writing this fact to try and be funny and make this post memorable or anything, it’s that such occurrences really are so rare, that I feel the need to really hammer it out and make sure it’s known.

And in spite of all the heavy swings the show does to break a lot of molds of Asian representation, the show still takes plenty of time to really tell the stories of the Asian sides of all the characters.  The importance of church to Korean-Americans.  The fetishization of Japanese culture when it comes to affluent white people.  And the sheer lack of communication between generations of Asian children with their own parents, which is an unfortunate trope that just about every second-generation Asian child deals with, with their respective parents.

I really enjoyed Beef as a whole.  But I’d be remiss to ignore the fact that on multiple occasions, I found the show really kind of difficult watch and digest at times, just because of the sheer relatability I felt with it.  It was like getting emotionally mind-fucked a few times, and I really wonder if any of my non-Asian friends and extended family that might watch it, will feel the same way I did when watching it.

I’m amazed I managed to write a post about this without resorting to any spoilers, but for what it’s worth to the zero people that read my swill, Beef is something that I highly recommend if you’re in the mood for a dark comedy that relies heavily on dialogue, but is full of substance, humor, and thought-provoking situations.