Tag: comparison

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.

Bron Breakker looks like a Costco rotisserie chicken

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Was watching a summary of the most recent episode of NXT, and when they got to the segment where a freshly heel-turned Bron Breakker got in the ring to get up in the business of Chase U, all I could think of was just how fucking orange Baby Steiner was.

Like, we’re talking even more orange than the former president guy, so orange that he looks like he belongs on Jersey Shore.  My knee jerk reaction was that he looked like a Costco rotisserie chicken, but one that was left in the oven four minutes past the timer, and whomever was in charge of the cooker at the time went on break to let it simmer in residual heat even longer.

There can’t be any way he thinks he looks good like this.  Sure, he still has the body and musculature of an Adonis, and there’s no denying the in-ring talent and he’s only going to get better with experience.  But the fact that he still looks like overcooked poultry certainly can’t help his career where appearances aren’t everything, but they still do hold a tremendous amount of weight.

And considering the tremendous heat on his family’s name with his dad going full bigot at a wrestling convention during Wrestlemania weekend, Steiner Jr. should be avoiding all possible sources of negative perception, including the ridicule and embarrassing things, like being the exact same color as a Costco rotisserie chicken.

Seriously, zero color correction went into these images.  I screen capped NXT, and shopped in an unedited photograph of a Costco chicken on top of it.  133 and 1/3% color match.

Would be hilarious if the patch affects player performance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I love how the 2023 baseball season has barely started, and regardless of the fact that the Mets obliterated payroll records, they still can’t escape being the Mets:

  • Newly re-signed closer Edwin Diaz out for the season with injury incurred during the World Baseball Classic, still getting paid $19.5M
  • Justin Verlander, who will make $43.3M this season, already on the disabled list with a teres-major injury
  • Robinson Cano, who was released by the Mets in 2022, and is currently unemployed, will still make $20M from the Mets

But as the Mets have demonstrated, all that shit’s just money, and they don’t seem to care how much of it they burn if they think its going to lead to moar winz.  The Diaz money is covered by insurance, Verlander will probably still have the best games of his season against the Braves, and well, Cano is a sunk cost that deferred money guys always seem to slip under the cracks unless it’s Bobby Bonilla (also the Mets’ problem lol).

However, this new jersey patch to commemorate the union between the Mets and New York Presbyterian Hospital?  Now that’s some tragic shit, that I can’t believe for a second will actually make it through the entire season.

When it comes to fans roasting their own team, few are as more savage and creatively funny as Mets fans, and despite being division rivals to the Braves, I have always gotten along well with Mets fans on the internet and I respect their candor and creativity when it comes to slamming on their own teams.  And from what I’ve already seen, I can’t really top or better a lot of the shit I’ve seen them dumping on the team for the absurdly ridiculous size of this patch.

But at this mammoth size, I have to imagine that it’s going to be capable of affecting player performance, just because of the general feel and added weight it’s going to add to the sleeve.  Like, when a poorly screen printed t-shirt’s design feels hard on your skin instead of the softness of a cotton shirt underneath; it doesn’t absorb sweat and makes you feel wet flesh on a hot day, little things that can make you feel uncomfortable.

And as neurotic and superstitious as baseball players are, little things that affect the touch and feel of their baseball uniforms, yeah I think it’s completely plausible that these gigantic fucking patches would have the capability to affect player performance.  Being on the left sleeve, I imagine a lefty hitter like Brandon Nimmo is going to feel the subtle weight of it when he gets into his batting stance, and it’s going to take a minute for him to get used to it, but any abject performance that occurs in that minute could be the difference in a winning and losing a game, and considering the Mets lost the division to the Braves by just one game, all wins do matter.

Maybe a player on defense will be uncomfortable with there being this bigass stiff square on their arm instead of the light neutrality of no patch, and it fucks up their timing and they start committing errors.  Or knowing the luck of the Mets, somehow, the patch is going to come into play for an injury stint for one of their $40M pitchers.

Either way, the likelihood of such coming into play isn’t very high, because if players can adjust to all this pitch clock bullshit, the death of the shift and limited pickoff attempts, they’ll get used to a patch, even if it is the size of a Domino’s Pizza box.  But if it did, it wouldn’t be surprising, because only the Mets could be the team that gets derailed by something as silly as an oversized sponsorship sleeve patch.

Wrestlemania: suck it, Cody

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was chatting with some of my bros over the two-night extravaganza, and I explained that no matter how much my level of involvement to professional wrestling ebbs and flows and wavers throughout the passage of time, there’s always a conceited effort to watch Wrestlemania.  It always comes back during Wrestlemania, and Mania and the Royal Rumble are the two shows a year that I feel very strongly about watching live.

This year’s Wrestlemania had a pretty stacked card on paper, and I felt that the WWE had done a pretty decent job of building up a respectable card from top to bottom, and wasn’t going to be anchored solely by Roman Reigns and then everyone else.  The Rey and Dominic Mysterio feud caught fire real late, and went from a cliché match to one that had some heat behind it, and as much as I hated the relegation of Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens because of the existence of Cody Rhodes, there was still a large amount of interest with their match against the Usos, because the Usos can have great matches against anyone, much less the level of talents that are Sami and Owens.

On paper, I was actually looking forward to night 1 more than the second night, because I thought that the card was better quality than then night 2’s card.  But after both shows, I actually thought night 2 was the stronger show, and it really wasn’t even close.

I thought almost all of the matches on night 1 were underperformed by all those involved, which was a little head-scratching considering the level of talent that was on the card.  John Cena had a pretty uninspired match with Austin Theory, and was disappointing, Rey and Dominic had too many people get involved with their match which watered things down, Charlotte and Rhea had an uncharacteristically below-par match, and despite it being the best match of the night, I genuinely felt that the Sami/KO vs. Usos match could’ve been better.  They were the best by default, because most of the matches prior weren’t as good as they could’ve been.

Night 2 was heavily weighted by the Intercontinental championship match, with Gunther continuing his torrid 2023 defeating both Drew McIntyre and Sheamus in a brutal shit-kicking smack-fest everyone knew it was going to be, and despite my tendency to think that the main event matches are typically predictable and academic, the Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes match served up the drama of genuinely not knowing who was going to win, which made it that much more exciting as it played out.

But speaking of Cody Rhodes, one of the things holding back the anticipation of the show was the almost seemingly inevitably that he was going to be the guy that was going to dethrone Roman Reigns, which as a fan irked the shit out of me, because of all the speculation that he has a world title reign baked into his contract, which is what was a big draw in being able to bring him back from AEW.

So seeing him take the L was kind of surprising to me, because I thought for sure it was going to be the night where the Roman Empire came to an end.  Not just because of Cody’s ludicrous contractual obligation to be WWE champion at some point, but Roman had been carrying the company for over 900 days at that point, and Joe Anoa’I probably was due for a long-needed vacation.

No matter though, because unlike a lot of wrestling fans out there, I was over the moon that Roman retained and the greatest championship run since Bruno Sammartino continues on.  I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m just not a fan of Cody Rhodes, and I’m quite pleased to see him finally lose a match since he returned to the WWE.

Continue reading “Wrestlemania: suck it, Cody” →

Dad Brog #108: Unless they figure out how to open doors

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

First, that’s a quote from Jurassic Park.  Obviously.  Secondly, my kids already know how to open doors.

However, they didn’t know how to unlock the doors… until now.

Since we converted #1’s crib into a bed, I fully baby-proofed the room and anchored all the furniture to the walls, and when we put her down for the night, we’ve locked the door behind us, so that she couldn’t open the door and go exploring around the house unsupervised.  And when I say locked the door, I mean locking the door from the inside so that we’re technically locked out, needing a key to get back in.

Since we got back from the cruise, #1’s sleep behavior has been off-kilter, and she has been a little more resistant to going to bed the last few days.  We don’t need the camera monitor to know that she’s upset about bedtime, based on some of the screaming she’s been doing in disagreement, but usually it stops after a while, and we can see that she’s passed out in bed.

But just the other day, along with the screaming of unhappiness, came some audible footsteps of her running to the door, and before we knew it, the sound of a door opening, and the frantic footsteps of an ornery three-year old charging down the hallway, and we realized that one of the raptors has figured out how to unlock doors.

Hold onto your butts.

Dad Brog #107: Finally had to use the Ladies’ Room

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One specific dad story/milestone I have from the cruise, is that for the first time ever, I’ve had to take my children into a women’s bathroom.  Typically I’ve just taken them into the men’s room with me, but with at least #1 needing actual toilets since she’s potty trained, it’s imperative that I have to have a stall available to me when I enter.  And as I’ve alluded to, the Magic is smaller than my previous Disney cruise (Fantasy), and it never felt more like it than the availability of restrooms.

Naturally, #1 says she has to go potty right after I’m left with both kids on my own, and thankfully there’s a set of restrooms nearby.  I go into the men’s room and sure enough both stalls are occupied, and after about two minutes it’s obvious the assholes in them are taking vacations, so I leave.  I see a cast member nearby, and I ask him if it’s okay if I use the women’s room since I have two daughters in tow, and they give me the green light.  I enter the women’s room, see one of the stalls is occupied, so I announce my male presence, I have daughters, the men’s room is full, and I need to use the stall.  I get the green light from an understanding woman, and it’s into the stall for my girls and I.

As #1 is doing her business, I hear the door open and a woman enters, so I announce my presence again, as to not freak out any women who hears a man in the room, even if I’m speaking to daughters.  She’s cool about it too, and I start making jokes about how I’m proud of my daughters and how a bunch of gross boys are hogging the men’s room, and we take care of business and get out hastily.

Ultimately, this was one of those situations where I’ve read about how other dads have handled it on the internet, but I didn’t think I’d really ever run into the situation myself.  But as I’ve said, the Magic isn’t the Fantasy and felt like it in terms of size, and into the ladies’ room I went.  Hopefully this will not be a regular occurrence over the next few years, but if it does, I only hope it goes as positively as this one did.

Dad of the year, right chere’.

I’m not perfect but I still did the right thing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So I’m out doing my food delivery moonlighting, and I get a ping that has me making a pickup at a Taco Mac.  I get to the Taco Mac, and as I’m walking into entrance, I’m pleased to see some bagged orders waiting at the host stand, hoping one of them is mine, so I can grab it and be on my merry way because time is money, and I might be able to eke out one more fare before it gets too late.

Unfortunately, neither of the orders are mine, and when the hostess has to go to the back to check on it, I know I’m in for a wait, which is always an annoyance because again, time is money, and when I’m waiting, I’m not earning, and I’m always concerned customers will take their frustration out at getting their food late on me, by virtue of pulling back tips.  The hostess comes back and says sorry, it’ll be like 10-15 min, is that okay, to which I roll my eyes and don’t give a real committed answer because I don’t want to cancel the fare because there’s no guarantee I’ll get another one as good immediately, but I also don’t want to wait that long.  I opt to wait, and resign myself that this is probably the last one of the night, and I go sit in an adjacent booth.

My foot hits something, and when I look down, I see that it’s a wallet.  Immediately my brain starts popping with the opportunity of finding some rich schlub’s wallet, and the prospect of an immediate payday, but at the same time, I don’t want anyone to really see that I found a wallet, lest anyone think I’m some sort of crook, even though my thoughts are immediately wondering how much cash could be in it.

I discreetly pick it up and a minute later, I pull it up onto the table like it was mine all along and I’m rooting through it, because there’s no harm in looking.  I see the driver’s license of some older white male, 6’0, white hair, lives in the same city as the restaurant.  I find a voter registration card, and based on his look and where we are, no surprise that he’s a registered Republican.  There’s no platinum or black cards anywhere to indicate that he’s particularly wealthy, but the address points to an area of some very affluent homes regardless.

And then we get to the cash, at first I find only a five a bunch of ones, but then I discover that there’s a second pocket, to where he clearly separates larger bills from the smaller ones.  Even still, there’s a few twenties, and we’re looking at $91 in cash here.

My mind is racing at this point, and I’m seeing the scales of justice in my head as I could easily hand this over to the hostess and be done with it, but at the same time having watched the lackadaisical and lackluster behavior of the host staff, I didn’t trust that they would do the right thing with this wallet, and if they were going to pilfer the cash, why shouldn’t I do it myself and benefit from it instead?

Which brings us to the other side, where I could be a complete shithead and just walk away with the wallet, keep the $91, toss the rest into the garbage and be done with it.  Brian McJoneserkowski has a bad Monday but ultimately lands on his feet after he freezes all his cards and goes to get a new license and loses not even a hundred bucks.

Because that $91 is basically a really good night of doing food delivery.  That $91 offsets the cost of breakfast for my household plus in-laws this morning.  That $91 is $91 that I didn’t have that I now have, which would be useful because I never feel comfortable financially and it would be a nice little break to get for once.

All this decision pondering was going on through my head while I was waiting for my tardy order to arrive, and I knew that I had to come to a decision soon, because once the food came out, I was on the clock to get it to the customer.

A part of me was pondering doing the real hero thing and delivering it back to the person’s home, but it was close to 10 pm, and I don’t imagine how well received it would be for some rando to show up at someone’s home at that late at night to return a wallet, and considering they were a white male and I was a minority, I’d probably get shot and/or arrested for suspicion of theft.  Because if this didn’t get resolved tonight, there’s no way I was going to give it any thought in the following days, and then I would’ve ended up keeping the cash and throwing the other effects away and have done the shithead thing in the end even if I didn’t intend to.

Ultimately, the decision I made is that in spite of the temptation to abscond with a free $91 and the fact that I admit to being tempted, and I admit to rooting through this guy’s wallet with not-quite so honorific thoughts in my head, at the end of the day, I’m no thief.  I’m not perfect, as I’ve so disclosed, but I’m not a thief.

To get around my distrust for the hosts, I went to the one worker who probably deals with left behind wallets and personal effects on a regular basis: the bartender.  I dropped it off with her, and hopefully she does the right thing and puts it into a safe or something, and isn’t sneaking off into the back to pocket the $91, but at this point it’s no longer my concern.

In the end, I know that I did the right thing, even if I took a very roundabout and questionable route.  Hopefully Charles McRepublican the III sobers up in the morning and has the wherewithal to get in touch with the Taco Mac and discover that some honorable paragon turned his wallet in without stealing any of his effects, and hopefully this earns me some positive karma that will benefit me in some positive fashion in the future.

I also think about the fact that I’m a dad with kids, and even if they weren’t with me, I’d have a hard time looking them in the eyes and trying to convince them that dada’s a good person, so even when they’re not around, I still feel like I need to be setting a good example for them, regardless of how tempted I might’ve been.