Tag: TLC

An unprecedented season of My 600 Lb. Life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If this post sucks beyond the reason than you just don’t happen to like my style of writing, it’s because Windows sucks, and locked up trying to go into fucking screen saver mode, and my only option was to hard reset, and I lost my original post and trains of thought.  Whenever something like that happens, I write with salt, because I’m determined to get my point across, but at the same time too exasperated to try and remember all the things that I wrote prior.

Anyway, what we have here is that lost amidst the oceans of television content out there, is an unprecedented season 9 of My 600 Lb. Life, where we have literally had a season where six episodes in, not a single patient has successfully made it onto the surgery table and had weight loss surgery.

Obviously it’s not much of a show about weight loss if every single patient in the season is failing, but the reality is that My 600 Lb. Life really isn’t so much about the weight loss itself as much as it is putting the spotlight on trainwrecks of human beings, making bad choices, dealing with mental issues, and because humanity seems to have a strange fascination with watching people eat, watching morbidly obese people eat terrible, horrible choices. 

I like to think people like to watch, because they can try to vicariously live through them in eating all of the delicious guilty pleasures in the world, without doing it themselves and then ballooning up to 600 lbs.

Anyway, it’s still amazing that we’ve had a season where nobody has succeeded.  One patient succeeded in losing the initial weight, but there were some overlying medical conditions that made the surgery inadvisable despite the fact that he met Dr. Now’s milestones, but the episode still ends with them not getting surgery, and likely to be followed up on My 600 Lb. Life – Where Are They Now?

Obviously, coronavirus has a lot to do with some of this, as I’m sure it’s been real difficult for TLC to scrape together a roster to film for season 9, because if there are any people who are the very definition of at-risk patients, it’s the morbidly obese.  But as those in the biz often say, the show must go on, and by hell or high water, My 600 Lb. Life has continued, and not only have we viewers seen a tremendous amount of failure throughout the season, we’ve seen some other anomalous things, like Dr. Now making a house call for the very first time (that I’m aware of), and I’m pretty sure one of the patients actually never made it to Houston and did their entire episode from wherever the fuck, America they were.

Honestly though, the failure doesn’t even matter.  It’s hardly a show about the weight loss anymore, as I previously said.  I think that viewers are more intrigued by the characters on the show, but none more than Dr. Now himself, who has either by directive of showrunners, to turn the heat up and deliver some more biting and meme-able lines, or just by virtue of dealing with so much bullshit, so many false promises, and seeing so much failure first-hand, that his resolve for his patients has deteriorated to where he’s snippy and claps back with some truly great remarks.  I can’t really speak for anyone but my wife and I, but we most definitely take a lot of enjoyment at the ironically entertaining things he says to his patients after he gives them three munt to lose 75 pounds and then they come back having lost anywhere from 8-14.

By now though, I’m actively rooting for a season in which we have a 100% failure rate.  I doubt it’s going to happen, but it would be truly epic on the lines of a 72-win Bulls season if we were to actually have a single season where nobody makes it onto the table.  And the best part of the show is that even if and likely when I get debunked and proven wrong, it’s always a delight to see the people who do get their shit together and drop weight, get surgery and then drop even more weight, because when things are going right, it’s really easy to root for these guys.

Advent Beer #8: Tannen Hell by Hohenthanner Schlossbrauerei

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t start drinking until I was 24.  I was admittedly one of those snooty 21-year olds with a stick up my butt that felt that he didn’t really need to drink at all in order to have a good time in life.  Eventually there were some changes in my life, and my sister was one of the people who really told me that I needed to loosen up and simply figure out how to have fun.  And among the changes I tried to make with my life then was that I figured that I should remove the stick out of my butt about drinking and just give it a shot.

So for the next few years I was making up for a lot of lost time, and I was basically trying everything.  Pretty early on, I realized that hard shit wasn’t really for me, wine was only on special occasions, and that when the day was over, beer was probably my jam.  And one of the things I learned early on, was that Asian beers, were pretty tame in terms of ABV, flavor, and other criteria that are popularly utilized to measure a beer.

Well, Tannen Hell, in spite of being a German bier, is basically an Asian beer.  My eyebrow furrowed after I popped the can, gave it a sniff, and poured it into my glass, and it was as bright and clear as lemonade.  Immediately, I began to hypothesize that this was going to be a fairly weak flavor, and it was confirmed seconds later with the first sip.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t terrible.  According to the snobs at BeerAdvocate, it’s classified as a lager, but this is an instance where I’d wonder if there’s some sort of subclass that this could be categorized in instead, because I’ve had my share of lagers, and few of them have been as light-bodied and as tame tasting as this one was.

It almost had like a cherry, fruity note somewhere in the flavoring, but that was about as much flavor as this beer had.  As I said, it was kind of bland, very light, and in spite of the 4.9% ABV, this is one of those times where I call bullshit because it’s almost like the closest thing to a Miller Lite I feel like I’ve had from a brand outside of ‘Murica.

Don’t really have much else to say about this one, and the fact that I’m itching to wrap this up because I have some 90 Day Fiancé to catch up on says everything that really needs to be said about Tannen Hell.  It’s not the worst of the bunch, but barely.

Current Rankings:

  1. First Coral (#2)
  2. Kirta (#5)
  3. Turbo Prop (#6)
  4. Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
  5. Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
  6. Hell (#1)
  7. Tannen Hell (#8)
  8. Käuzle (#3)

It must be nice to be HBO

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because it seems like just about everything they touch is basically gold.  And because all they do is produce gold, they can somehow manage to not just survive, but continue to thrive releasing programming in an episodic format, whereas just about everyone else out there is being forced to drop entire series at a time in order to make ends meet.

As much as I love binging shows on Netflix, their sheer thirst for churning out original and acquired content means that we’re long past the days of stalwart originals like House of Cards, Daredevil, and Stranger Things, and for as many good shows and series there are in Netflix’s libraries, there’s almost a growing equal amount of clunkers in the tank as well.

HBO is more like a baseball player that does nothing but hit home runs.  They curate vastly more than their television competitors, and they produce a vastly higher clip of quality programming than anyone else.  I’m currently watching Lovecraft Country and the show that follows it in The Vow, and both are excellent pieces of programming, and as much as I’d love to binge them, I can’t, because HBO is still operating in an antiquated format of releasing them weekly, an episode at a time, but there’s nothing I can do about it except feel owned and sit patiently for the next installment to come out.

I realize this has often been the case throughout the years, with most notably series like Game of Thrones and then Westworld coming out to capture the imagination and to anchor the entire network for years.  And by proxy of such hard carries, other shows get exposure, and I have fond recollections of watching captivating series like True Detective and The Night Of, both of which were strong series.  Shiny Objects was fantastic, and even the shit that are more comic and one-offs, like Class Action Park and 7 Days in Hell are gold as well.

And then, they get shit like the Watchmen television series, and it just further proves that HBO can seemingly do no wrong.  To pile onto all this winning, each stalwart series is always a vehicle towards the next one, with carefully curated advertising for the next hit series often placed as a preview going into the next episode of what you’re really wanting to watch.

The point of this whole post is really to just show a little bit of love towards HBO for constantly and consistently putting out top-notch content.  Both Lovecraft Country and The Vow have been excellent watches, and they’re one of the few indulgences mythical wife and I make time for every single week because 90 Day Fiance: The Other Way is on hiatus, there’s currently no guarantee that there’s even going to be a ninth season of My 600 Lb. Life. Frankly, in my little world HBO is the only network outside of the Discovery family of networks that remotely is worth existing.

90 Day Fiance: The Other Way power rankings

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Just finished up watching 90 Day Fiance: The Other Way, on the greatest network in the history of television, TLC, and I must say that TLC did well putting together yet another classic train wreck that I so very thoroughly enjoyed.  Just when I was beginning to think that the classic 90DF formula was getting a little stale, considering how formulaic the show had become, with a woman from South America, a woman from the Pacific Islands, one guy with deeply conflicting beliefs than the American girl’s family, the couple with the massive age difference, and then the one layup couple, that usually had a religious crutch to stabilize them throughout the show, TLC flips the script and jettisons a bunch of Americans to other countries for some fresh perspective and cringey Americans being Americans behavior.

Anyway, kudos to TLC for breathing some new life into the series.  Not that it would’ve stopped me from watching in the first place, and at the time I’m writing this, I’d already seen a preview for 90DF-Prime, which is supposedly going to be premiering soon, which gives me little time to enjoy the aftermath of The Other Way before we embark in another season of regular 90DF.

Regardless, let’s get to the point of this entire post, which is to do a power ranking of the couples of The Other Way.  And when I say “power,” I really mean just how terrible of human beings they are.  And for the sake of simplicity, instead of ranking them as individuals, I’m just going to rank them by the worst member of each couple, because when the day is over, as long as the cameras are rolling, the couples always stick together like glue no matter what.

#6 Deavan & Jihoon – nothing was more telling about how low-maintenance and lacking in drama compared to their counterparts were, than the fact that Deavan and Jihoon weren’t even introduced into the show until like four episodes in.  And it’s not at all that surprising, because despite how much TLC tried to make it sound like the crime of the century, Jihoon’s checkered past of buying and re-selling cell phones in Seoul was pretty small.  Frankly, their arc was most anchored by the fact that Deavan’s previous child was a demon, and the atypical judgey Korean parents that really were uncomfortable with the fact that their son was marrying a train wreck of an American girl.

Neither were particularly memorable.  Deavan used to be kind of an Instagram camwhore, and Jihoon was more or less an underachiever in terms of Korean culture.  Ironically, Deavan was the one with more grown-up priorities, and Jihoon was just kind of a horny pussyhound, but when the day was over, neither were particularly memorable; except for the horrifically stereotypical Asian music played by the show whenever the perspective shifted back to them.

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Hoarders: office leftovers edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout my career, I’ve worked primarily in office environments.  After around 20 years of this kind of professional lifestyle, it’s safe to say that I’ve been inside of them to know that if you’ve worked in one, you’ve kind of worked in all of them.  Otherwise, shows like The Office or movies like Office Space don’t exist, because anyone’s who’s ever been in office life can immediately relate.

One of the more fascinating sociological observations there are in an office environment is the introduction of communal food; namely the inevitable leftovers that typically occur, because in most cases, office environments almost always end up with more food than there are people capable of eating it all.  Typically, in most places I’ve been, leftovers are often times placed in a break room or somewhere publicly communal, and then some admin sends a wide-reaching mass email to notify everyone that there’s free food leftover.  Cue the chargers.

My current workplace is no exception to this practice.  If anyone on my floor has any sort of catering, the leftovers are often put in the breakroom and the floor admin emails the whole floor to let all teams know that there’s free food available, and then the same people stampede en masse to pick at the remains, and even worse, there are some who simply just collect and hoard, effectively denying those who might actually want to eat immediately.

The thing is, my current workplace is a gargantuan office campus, so there are tons of floors potentially doing the same thing on any given day.  It’s gotten to the point where there’s a Slack channel dedicated to people all sharing information on where there are leftovers somewhere on the campus, prompting people to be going to some odd and unrelated to their jobs corners of the property in order to get some free leftovers.

But among these level-5 scavengers are the aforementioned hoarders who don’t just go hunting for leftovers, but like they do on their own floor, go to hoard and save them, for later consumption.  It’s these particular people that serve as the impetus to this post, because as I’m sure everyone’s seen the office scavengers in their own respective offices, I have to wonder how many people have come across such office hoarders, who go around hunting for leftovers not just for instant gratification, but for preparation for future meals on a larger scale.

Case in point, these particular individuals go as far as to have a stockpile of Tupperware, saran wraps and aluminum foil in their desks, with the intent of hoarding leftover food from around the campus.

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Thoughts on 90 Day Fiancé season 6

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I knew 2019 was off to a great start when we discovered that the TLC Go app had opened their doors to our cable provider, thus allowing us to access to watch TLC programming, completely on demand.  That being said, I don’t often have to worry about not having something to watch at any given point with the vast majority of TLC’s library now available to me with the push of a few buttons.

Obviously, shows like My 600 Lb. Life are among the marquee shows that I favor the most, and classics like Extreme Cheapskates and Extreme Couponing inexplicably didn’t get renewed for anything beyond two seasons.  But if I had to pick one show that stood out above all others as my go-to for TLC programming, it is and has always been, 90 Day Fiancé.

I’m not ashamed to say it, but I’ve literally watched every season of 9DF.  The irony is that I’ve really liked a lot of shows in my time, but eventually everything falls to the wayside for whatever reason(s).  Archer, The Walking Dead, and American Horror Story come to mind as shows that I’ve at times gotten lukewarm with and allowed them to slide over to the back burner.  But not 9DF.  Nah dog, I’ve literally seen every single episode (of at least the core series), and I’m fairly certain I can name every single person who’s been on the show if shown a picture.

So I just recently finished season 6, and I was thinking that I was playing some major catchup; little did I realize that I basically caught up to season’s actual air dates, and probably wrapped up the main episodes right as the season was winding down with its typical tell-all episodes at the end.

Needless to say, there have been some real trainwrecks throughout the series, but I think season 6 really outdid themselves at finding some truly tv-worthy couples this time around.  I mean, every previous season always had one kind of anchor couple, or layup couple, as in the one couple that anyone could tell was the stable one, vanilla one, bland one, or rather the couple that everyone knew was going to be fine, even after the cameras stopped rolling.  Usually, they were the one where one or both of the couple were religious, and it was pulling teeth trying to get any sort of drama or entertainment value out of them.

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It only took four seasons

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

(**spoilers alert** I’m sure I’m the only person who really watches 90 Day Fiance)

But it looks like we’ve finally got the failure to launch that I’ve been pining for since the series began.  Listen, I don’t know when the show actually aired, because watched the entire season via TLC GO at my own leisure, and I don’t know if anyone other than me actually cares about the show, but damn it, I just finished it, so here we stand with me writing about it, for a brog that is still down for eight months going.

Anyway yeah, I’ve been hoping for a failure since the show started.  The show has always kind of had a particular dynamic, with almost a formulaic dichotomy of couples each season, with there being at least one layup of a couple that would make it to the altar with minimal disruptions, but everyone else would have varying degrees of obstacles and hangups that left viewers wondering if they would make it. 

Eventually, it became apparent by season 2, that for the sake of television, the success rate for all couples was extremely high, as frankly no couple wanted to be the couple that failed for television, and by the time season 3 wound down, I was pretty resigned to the fact that every couple was going to make it, regardless of what might happen after the cameras stop rolling. No matter how unlikely the compatibility between Mike & Aziza or Jason & Cassia seemed, they were going to make it.

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