Tag: observations

I’m pretty sure basketball is nothing like slavery, bro

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: NBA guard Dennis Schroder, exasperated by how many times he’s been traded in his career, likens the process to ‘modern day slavery’

Fewer things inspire me to get on a keyboard and pound out some words like professional athletes complaining about well, anything, considering the fact that they’re all overgrown man-children who get paid exorbitant amounts of money to play children’s games at an extraordinary level.  And in this case, we have NBA player, Dennis Schroder, whom jaded from witnessing one of the most lopsided and surprising trades in the history of professional sports, decided to air out his frustrations and compare the stress of being traded to being the modern day equivalent to, slavery:

It’s like modern slavery. It’s modern slavery at the end of the day,” Schröder said. “Everybody can decide where you’re going, even if you have a contract.

First, I don’t think Dennis Schroder understands what slavery really is.  As defined by Merriam-Webster, slavery is:

1a: the practice or institution of holding people involuntarily and under threat of violence
1b: the state of a person who is forced usually under threat of violence to labor for the profit of another

Last time I checked, NBA players, like all other professional athletes are usually not under the threat of violence, and furthermore, are actually paid wages in order to perform their trade, which in the case of Dennis Schroder, is to play basketball.

I didn’t know who Dennis Schroder was, and I was tickled by the fact that he actually spent five years in Atlanta.  But I figured that he must be some scrub who has been hanging onto a career in the NBA and has mostly been living on league minimum salaries, which by the way, the NBA absolute league minimum is still $1.1 million dollars, and more for guys who have the years of experience that Schroder has, which is to say that being an NBA player pays at the very least 1.1 million times more than what slaves got when slavery was a thing.

But in fact, Dennis Schroder himself has actually cleared the vaunted $100M mark as far as career earnings go.  In spite of my initial thought that he had to have been some scrub, he’s apparently not a bad player, having averaged 14 points and nearly 5 assists a game as mostly a backup point guard, which are pretty above average numbers in my estimation, and seems worthy of the $100M he’s earned in his career thus far.

But such adds to the absurdity of a guy that’s made this much money to be making the dumb comparison of trading players being akin to slavery, and adds to the narrative of the bullshit tone-deaf chasm between professional athletes and ordinary citizens of the world.

I get that he’s probably frustrated that he’s been traded five times in his career and has had to move now, eleven different times, but that’s all part of the deal of being a professional athlete.  You are nothing but an asset, no matter what management tells you, and when the day is over, you are available to be traded and dumped and moved on a moment’s notice, if the needs of the business outweigh the needs of the asset.

The Luka trade was almost like a league-wide reminder that nobody is untouchable, on top of all other analytical reasons why it’s potentially one of the most lopsided deals in history, but the fact remains nobody is untouchable.  Schroder may be on his eighth NBA team, but there are all sorts of guys way more talented and famous than him that have been bounced around as much as him if not more.

Hall of Famer, Moses Malone has played for nine.  Future Hall of Famer, Vince Carter, played for eight NBA teams in his career.  Apparently, the NBA record is some dude named Ish Smith, who played 14 years in the league, and played for 12 different franchises, having been traded six times.  And even he still cleared $44M in career earnings, galaxies apart from what Kunta Kinte made in Roots.

In all fairness, Schroder quickly realized the colossal fail of what he said, and tried to walk it back some and acknowledge that he makes a lot of money and is blessed to be able to do what he does.  But speech has no undo button, and the media that recorded him will always have on record of him making his completely absurd remarks.  And comparing the woes of being traded as a professional athlete to slavery is about as big of a fuck up as there can be, but he’ll be lucky that the media is still mostly all over the Luka trade to give him any attention beyond the knee-jerk reaction.

The Duolingo gamified XP vortex

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks, I haven’t really felt like writing much.  I got sick for the first time in a long time with what was probably the flu, in fact my entire household was hit pretty hard, and it was a pretty trying time for everyone in the home then.  When I wasn’t sick, I was working, and when I wasn’t working, I was being a parent to the best capacity as I could.

The kids are going to bed, regardless of if they actually go to sleep or not immediately, at anywhere from 7:30-8 pm, so among the numerous adaptations of life as a parent, is coming to the grips that I have even less time to myself on a daily basis, especially factoring in the daily resetting of the home that apparently I’m the only one who gives a fuck about, cleaning and preparation for the following day.

So in like the two hours I might actually have every single day, writing hasn’t exactly been a high priority for me, despite being one of the only activities that actually means something to me.  It’s just that I’m neurotic, and I want to have something to write about, and time and peace to do it, and it’s not been often where all the conditions have been ideal to actually do any writing.  In fact, writing this right now isn’t entirely idea, but I’ve crossed into that realm of feeling obligated to write something because I don’t like to have too lengthy gaps in my posting onto a brog that nobody reads.

Among the few things that I have been doing in those miniscule 2~ hours a day I have, has been a lot of Duolingo, continuing on my self-pursuit to improve mi español.  I take solace in the fact that it’s actually something productive, and not just spending all my free time playing Fire Emblem Heroes, Pokémon GO, or any of the Solitaire games that I’ve been burning a lot of free time on the last few months.

It’s a cleverly developed app and I genuinely feel like I am progressing a lot in the short time that I’ve been doing it, and there’s a clear difference in when you’re learning a language as a school requirement, versus learning a language because I want to learn it, for ultimately, practical purposes.  The social aspect of it is nice, and I understand the power of doing an activity together, and I like having friend streaks with actual people I know, and it’s nice knowing that others are also trying to improve their linguistic acumen same as I am.

But I have to say, one of the things that I think kind of works counter culture to the generally well-considered ideals and modus operandi of the app is the whole league system, pitting users all around the world against each other, in a rat race of accumulating XP, regardless of the actual knowledge gained by everyone.

I know that there’s power in motivating people by sizing themselves up against peers, but I find it to be a flawed system that I think might work against the actual growth of users, but typing all this out, I’m beginning to wonder if that that’s kind of the point, and for a company that probably relies on users to shell out money for subscriptions, I suppose it’s a clever mechanic to ensure that users continue to use the product after all.

But what I’m getting at is that it definitely triggers the competitive nature in me, but I’m also not blind to the fact that sometimes when I’m feeling extra competitive, or I see the tryhard in the rankings above me is within striking distance, I’ll be tempted to do as many lessons and modules as I can in a short amount of time to beat the clock at the end of the week’s rankings.  Admittedly, I’m probably not actually learning as much when I’m doing such, because I’m just trying to farm XP versus actually taking the time to read and learn and absorb as I really should be doing at this infant stage of mi journey de español.

And the worst part about the rankings is that I think I’m doing good, with like 3,000 XP in a week, but then there’s like 1-2 mega tryhards who have completely doubled me up, that I’ll never catch up to in a short amount of time.  I’m wondering if they’re bots, or they’re actual people, and sometimes out of curiosity, I’ll click on their names to see what they’re doing, and ten times out of ten, these are users who are signed up for multiple modules, and basically farming 2-3 times the XP as users like me who are doing a single course can possibly accumulate.

Undoubtedly, these cocksuckers are abusing the system by most likely doing their native tongue on top of something that they’re trying to learn, because I’ll see these tryhards like Amelie doing English and French or Ludvig doing English and German and Ronaldo doing English and Portuguese, and I’m like wtf.  And then there are some ultra tryhards who are doing bullshit courses like music theory and basic math to further farm up their XP numbers, and I’m just like fuck this.

I think Duolingo needs to adjust their categories to account for number of courses enrolled in, or better yet, eliminating the whole ranking system outright.  I mean they have their reasons that I’ve probably surmised for creating a little bit of chaos, but too much chaos could ultimately alienate and chase off users too.

But I dislike that I’m clearly a sucker for the ranking system, as I have yet to fail to be promoted to the ensuing tier in just the month that I’ve been doing this.  But holistically, when I get all ranking-obsessed, I probably am not learning and absorbing as much as I probably was when I had started using the app in my original first few days, and that, is not necessarily a good thing for my desired comprehension.

Seems appropriate that Zombie Deer have made their way to Georgia

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Chronic Wasting Disease, aka the zombie deer disease has started showing up in Georgia

A friend of mine already popped all the actual science behind a lot of this, but imagine how much my imagination exploded upon hearing the words “zombie deer” and “in Georgia.”  The fact that I’m posting about it regardless of the fact that I’ve heard the science that mostly ruins my fantasy that this is the start of the zombie apocalypse goes to show that much like actual zombies, there is life in this topic, even after it it’s dead.

Sure, it is has a 100% kill rate among deer that get infected, which sucks for the deer, and unsurprising, there have been many cases of humans who have already eaten CWD-infected venison.  Yes, there have been deaths in some cases, but as long as the dumbasses aren’t eating The Big Texan slabs of it, it seems to mostly just result in horrific intestinal issues that don’t always kill humans.

Originally, I had all these grand ideas about how Georgia and inevitably the rest of the world were going to be fucked, because relying on the subsect of hunters that fall into categories of being dumb, uneducated, ignorant, some of all of the above if not completely all of the above, to not eat infected venison, allow the disease to mutate and become zootic, leading to the zombie plague for humanity, seemed kind of inevitable.

And how the thought of the zombie apocalypse beginning still seemed preferable to the orange-colored America we were going to be embarking on for the next four years, and I likened it to my version of the choosing the bear meme that women had with a little while ago.

At least in a zombie apocalypse, sure the rate of mortality would probably drop tremendously for humanity as a species, but at least if any zombies threatened me or my family, the opportunity to legally bludgeon and beat the ever-living fuck out of something would be unlocked, and completely in the name of self-defense.  A life-long fantasy of killing zombies seems like a fair trade off, in exchange for getting away from lily-orange America, at least it does in my opinion.

But no, like I said, a friend of mine already burst my bubble by dropping a lot of actual factual science as far as CWD goes which is funny that it’s such an acronym, considering it’s so very close to the popular The Walking Dead TWD acronym.  And most everyone knows that Georgia is basically the zombie capital of America, considering it’s history for being the backdrop for TWD, Zombieland, and all sorts of zombie film and television at this point.  So it seems very appropriate for zombie deer to finally have made their arrival in Georgia, and it’s really a surprise in itself that it didn’t start here in the first place.

Who does Roki think he’s fooling?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MLB: .com makes a point to let everyone know that next big Japanese shit, pitcher Roki Sasaki will not be signing with the Yankees

Back in like 1998, there was an episode of WCW Monday Nitro where Bret Hart was cutting a promo in the ring with Mean Gene Okerlund, going on about whatever Bret Hart martyr speak he was gushing about at the time, most likely his beef with the nWo.  And then without any notice, Brian Adams, formerly Crush of WWE just meanders into the ring to confront Bret.

At the time, the nWo was wildly more popular than anything WCW-branded, and the nWo was seemingly adding new members left and right, whether they were WCW guys turning coat, or guys just coming into the company just being introduced as new nWo members.

Brian Adams was pretty much a guy that had been primarily a bad guy heel character throughout his whole career to this point, so he seemed like a natural fit for the nWo.  Furthermore, he came into the ring wearing all black and a black trench coat, and the most cliched trope in history at the time was opening a coat and revealing a nWo shirt underneath, oh what a dastardly bad guy.

Basically, Adams got on the mic and told Bret Hart that he would have his back in his plight against the nWo, but absolutely anyone with even just a quarter of a brain knew what was going to happen.  Neither Bret or Mean Gene were remotely convinced, and even the crowd, and WCW crowds were a very different breed of dumb wrestling fans, could smell the most obvious of rats in the history of attempted trickery.

Sure enough, they didn’t even bother to save it for a later segment much less a future show, and Adams opened his coat to reveal the nWo shirt that even Ray Charles could see was there, and Bret got a beatdown when the rest of the gang showed up.

Roki Sasaki is basically Brian Adams, and pretty much every baseball fan on the planet knows he’s going to end up on the Dodgers.  No matter what he says, no matter what bullshit media reporting is done that he’s “giving everyone a chance,” and trying to convince people that there’s a possibility he ends up anywhere other than the Dodgers.

A guy who probably speaks no English isn’t going to want to go to any place not a small market with absolutely no Japanese presence much less Asians in general.  He’s not going to Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and I highly doubt Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Oakland Las Vegas Sacramento, or Baltimore were any of the 20 teams that were reportedly interested because Japanese hot shits require this thing called money to even be invited into the conversation.

Japanese hot shits want money, and want comfort.  So they require a big market, preferably one with Japanese and other Asian people, to have some remote chance that they can get a taste of home when they’re playing abroad.  This is why New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles are always in the conversation whenever Japanese hot shits are on the market, but when it comes down to it, Los Angeles always covers multiple bases because they offer money, comfort of demographic, and the shortest flight distance to Japan, which is why they typically have the highest success rate at landing them.

Geography is undefeated. 

Nobody’s buying it, and nobody really even cares.  At this point, it’s more exasperating that they’re wasting people’s time at even bothering to exert time and energy into this sad ruse, and baseball fans just want him to go ahead and declare the Dodgers his choice of destination, have his shitty little press conference, put on his jersey and shut the fuck up so we can move onto the next storyline, or even the arrival of Spring Training.

Furthermore, the Dodgers have been low-key tampering with the whole thing, with golden boy Shohei Ohtani probably having all sorts of conversations and being in his ear trying to recruit him, since they were national team teammates.

Money isn’t going to be an issue, because the Dodgers would probably defer 60%+ of the contract until like 2040.  The only real issue is that the Dodgers frankly don’t need Roki, because they already have a full pitching rotation with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Balakey Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Dustin May, and eventually Ohtani himself, but there’s always the possibility that Ohtani just goes another season as just a DH while he recovers, and the Dodgers aren’t the type of team to not pick up a hot shit free agent because they have no need, so much as they can deny others from getting them.

The only question mark and viable alternative to the Dodgers are the San Diego Padres, who also fulfills a lot of the Japanese hot shit checkboxes, but they also play in paradise.  Plus, the fact that Yu Darvish is already there is the safety net that holds some legitimate weight for Japanese guys.

But if I’m a betting man, when Roki does peel off his black trench coat, I still got the Dodgers shirt on underneath.  In the cyclical ecosystem of baseball, the rich tend to get richer, before they eventually age out, crash out and bail out before they actually deal with any sort of adversity, many years down the line.

I mean it might’ve been a coincidence, or it might not have

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I saw this meme about how Hulk Hogan was booed the fuck out of Los Angeles during his cheap appearance at the RAW is Netflix debut, and then the following day began the insane fires that have completely decimated the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst regions of the greater Los Angeles area; confirming that god was in fact, a Hulkamaniac, brother.

I admit that I did smirk upon seeing that, which is also admittedly inappropriate and off-base considering the very real tragedy and horror that the California fires have been wreaking out in LA, but sometimes all we can do at times is just laugh, no matter if it’s appropriate or not.  Life and the world are fucked up like that sometimes.

I’m deliberate in not calling them wildfires, because to me, wildfires imply that they were started by in most cases, a lighting crash that then causes enough sparks to ignite something dry and flammable, and then it blazes out of control.  By definition, something that happened in the wild, naturally. 

The cause of the fires have not been determined yet, but I’m going to say that if it were sunlight magnifying through a littered piece of plastic or a glass bottle that set some makeshift kindling on fire, or what I’m going to guess is more likely some stoners hiding in the hills and discarding a joint or a cigarette butt, then they were not caused in the wild, and more accurately caused by the stupidity of people.  Stupidfire.  Dumbfire.  But I’m not going to wager that it was actually a wildfire that’s caused all this chaos.

All the same, it’s a horrendous tragedy and nightmare that is still not over, and serves to kick the 2025 year off to a terrifying start as one of the big stories of the year.

Getting back to Hulk Hogan though, I get why people booed him.  Sure, some of it has to do with his history of getting caught on tape being racist and dropping N-words, and more likely has to do with his very public political allegiance, cringingly going up on stage during an orange guy rally to cut a promo in support, and ripping his shirt.  Probably both, in most cases.

But fans aren’t as dumb as I like to sometimes embody them as, and when it really comes down to it, I feel like most people have come to their own conclusions that Terry Bollea, the man himself, is just kind of a dude who’s full of shit, and is pretty shameless when it comes to utilizing the Hulk Hogan persona in order to benefit himself optimally.  Like there are plenty of other wrestling personalities who are known Republicans and have donated large sums of money to orange’s plight, but they don’t parade it around like Hogan did.

And I know a lot of people are really trying to do such these days, to carve out of their lives, the people whose political ideologies don’t necessarily mesh with their own, and if I did that, I’d lose one of my best friends, and many in my family, who support party without thinking about it, even if their representative exists entirely counterculture to their very existence.  I often feel like an island when I explain to others that I am willing to accept people who support the alternative, especially when we already have a long positive history behind us.  And if I were to consider professional contacts in the mix, I live in fucking Georgia, if I’d want to keep my job, I’d have no other to be able to tolerate.

That being said, I did find a modicum of amusement of the correlation between Hulk Hogan getting boo’d and then the fires starting in Los Angeles, meaning god might just be a Hulkamaniac.  I’ve met Hulk Hogan before, and he was friendly and gave me knucks for coincidentally wearing a Hulkamania shirt.  I can’t say I’d be nearly as pumped if the opportunity ever arose to meet the guy again, because I do think he’s just this walking meme of a human being with some very large public flaws hanging from him, but at the same time, I wouldn’t treat him like a piece of shit and go out of my way to disrespect the man.

Alright, done writing about Hulk Hogan, preferably for a long time, or at least until he does something else stupid and worthy of busting out a litany of Hulkamania references.

Notre Dame for the Natty; and chaos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

An interesting thing happened this year’s college football bowl season; with the playoff expanded to 12 teams, it basically murdered any interest I could have in absolutely any other bowl game that wasn’t a CFB playoff game.  Even Virginia Tech being in the Belk Duke’s Mayo Bowl, which is maybe like a C-tier bowl, instead of the E-tier that shit like the TransPerfect Music City Bowl or ReliaQuest Bowl couldn’t interest me in the least bit.  And I don’t think such was the intention of the CFB committee, but at the same time I don’t think they should be surprised that fucks to give for any bowl that wasn’t a playoff game, actually ended up being quite minimal.

Anyway, the field is set for the National Championship, with it being The Ohio State University against Notre Dame, two schools I typically give no shits about beyond that I want to see them lose every time I hear their names in competition.  Not that I had any real horse in the race, but I obviously hoped for Georgia to win a third natty in recent years for the fact that they’re the hometown team for me, but their chances seemed like a wash when Carson Beck was ruled out after hurting himself in the SEC Championship.

Texas was my B-pick, because I proclaimed that the Natty really was theirs to lose; and it’s not because I like Texas by any stretch of the imagination, but if we really did end up with a Texas vs. UGA III, I didn’t think there was any chance that Georgia could upend them a third consecutive time in a single season.  And if there’s any consolation at all for me, there’s always some degree of satisfaction in being right.

However both schools shit the bed, and we’re stuck with TOSU and ND for the first-ever 12-team playoff version Natty, and I really couldn’t give a shit on who actually wins.  Honestly, I think TOSU is probably going to win, like a 38-17 contest because they look like world beaters right now, and they did win the first-ever 4-team playoff, so it just seems like one of those kismet things that they’d win the first-ever 12-team playoff, out of some weird tradition.

But for the sake of picking someone to root for, I think I’m going to be rooting for Notre Dame; not because I like them in the least bit*, but because Notre Dame winning a National Championship is basically the worst thing to happen for the CFB committee, who will undoubtedly be facing a lot of difficult questions should ND win the Natty, and I like the idea of chaos being brought to their doorstep instead of TOSU getting to be National Champions.

*especially since they no longer have a Korean kicker

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How have the Mariners sucked so historically?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was seeing some news about the 2025 baseball hall of fame ballot, and the only sure-fire, slam dunk guarantee on it is Ichiro, and the real question is if he’s going to get a unanimous induction, or if this will be another year where some anonymous BBWAA tryhard deliberately doesn’t vote for him for the sanctity of the Hall of Fame, and then goes into hiding so they don’t have to take any criticism for their, most likely in the case of Ichiro, racism because there’s absolutely no metric or no logical rationale why he isn’t worthy of unanimous induction.

I don’t particularly care for the overly-nationalistic disparaging remarks he’s made about Korean baseball throughout his career, but there’s absolutely no way to deny the fact that he’s was a legendary player, but I digress and will save these bullets for the midseason for when he inevitably gets 99.76% of the vote and one voter who will successfully remain anonymous, goes into hiding afterward.

But Felix Hernandez is also on the ballot for the first time, and I think he’s up for debate on whether he’s Hall-worthy or not; the man has a Cy Young and pitched a perfect game.  He doesn’t have the 3,000+ strikeouts, and he started his decline phase at around 32, but at the same time, his major league career started when he was 19, so he still enjoyed over a decade in the big leagues.

He also didn’t win a World Series, but the thing is, and the impetus of this entire post, neither has anyone else in Mariners history, no matter how talented or legendary of players have played for the team. 

It really got me thinking, how have the Seattle Mariners sucked so much throughout history?  Sure, they’ve only been around since 1977, way younger than teams like the Braves, Phillies, Reds, Yankees and Red Sox, but still, in the team’s entire history, they’ve only made the playoffs five times, and have collectively gone 15-22 in those appearances.  They’ve never made it to the World Series, and there was one year in which they set the modern record for regular season wins, winning an astonishing 116 games, only to get bounced out of the playoffs unceremoniously by the Yankees in the ALCS.

There was a stretch in time where the Mariners had a prime Ken Griffey, Jr., a Cy Young winning Randy Johnson, and even a young and rapidly rising Alex Rodriguez.  All were gone by 2001, but then there was a stretch when Ichiro came to the United States, and by 2005, Felix Hernandez arrived and was routinely one of the best pitchers in the game.  In between these eras was Edgar Martinez, who is a Hall of Famer in his own right, and was beloved in Seattle that the street near their ballpark is named after him.

Like, with all the talent that has been in Seattle for long swaths of time, really begs the question, how have the Mariners actually sucked?

Yes, no single player can carry entire teams, but that logic is nowhere less than it is in baseball, where single players have managed to carry entire teams on their backs for small stretches of time, and usually talented players often inspire other talented players to want to come play with them, making the teams richer in talent when it happens.

It’s just incredible to think that even with such legendary talents such as Griffey and Ichiro, Johnson and Martinez, and even A-Rod and King Felix, the Mariners just could never put things together and see any success.  Like, after the 2001 season where they won 116 games, the franchise went 20 years before they saw the playoffs again, and frankly that’s mostly on account of the fact that they added an extra round which let a non-division winner like the 2022 squad even have chance.

As good as Ichiro was, after his mind-blowing rookie season where he won RoY and MVP, 2001 was the only time he ever saw the playoffs as a Mariner.  Felix Hernandez, as good as he was, never pitched a single post-season game in his entire career.  Griffey and Randy Johnson played in two of the Mariners’ five playoff appearances, Alex Rodriguez played in three, and Edgar Martinez played in four of them, since he played until he was 62 years old.

Things don’t really look like they’re going to get any better any time soon, especially in today’s MLB ecosystem, but I’d have to wager that after all this time, the Seattle Mariners franchise’s perception has become reality – they’re simply a squad that will never win, no matter how talented of players emerge and play for them, they either fizzle their careers out in Seattle, or they go to other places and win championships, like Alex Rodriguez and Randy Johnson did, Kyle Seager very recently, and even old vets like Jamie Moyer and Freddy Garcia.

Because when some of the greatest players in history couldn’t do it while they were there, sometimes concurrently, then I’m not going to wager that anyone will.  Most know that there’s no crapshoot like there is in baseball, but the Mariners are plagued with something completely else.