Tag: social media

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Dook sounds about appropriate

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Souse: South Fulton teenager accepted into allegedly over 50 schools; claims to have already selected Duke University

Dear god, of all the #TRYHARDs on the planet, here we have actually managed to circle back and find ourselves at the same school as one of the already chronicled tryhards.  Coming out of the same school that earlier this SZN boasted two fellas who humblebragged about gaining 63 and 50 college acceptances, we have yet another TRYHARD who has allegedly been accepted into over 50 colleges herself.

And because the lion’s share of the colleges aren’t worth writing home about, it’s pointed out that the cumulative amount of scholarship dollars that she’s amassed has exceeded $1.3M dollars despite it not working the way people might think it does.

But imagine being the students on the senior wall next to this girl’s, or the two other TRYHARDs who have 63 and 50 schools under their heads, and they’ve only got their three acceptances, and not to any particularly noteworthy schools either.  I can’t imagine it’s a particularly great system they’re running at the school, where such obvious visual measuring sticks are literally pasted onto the walls among their peers.  This is about as close to Japanese score-posting as we’re going to get in ‘Murica.

One thing that is interesting about this particular TRYHARD’s journey is that she claims to have spent a tremendous amount of time; three hours a night over several months, applying to all these schools.  Considering the circumstances, and the desire for lots of schools to be able to check off their Affirmative Action participation, I was under the impression that if one was a poor minority from a title-1 school, all they really had to do was fill out forms as basic as signing one’s life away to an online credit card application to apply for schools, which is how so many of these kids manage to churn out 50+ applications.

However, among those 50+ college acceptances, our TRYHARD in question does appear to be shooting for the moon a little bit, and isn’t just settling for an HBCU offering up a free and clear ride; she has proclaimed her intention to go to Duke, which as much of a school I loathe for their athletics, is still an academically reputable institution, and if for anything at all, getting that piece of paper and gaining access to the alumni network is worth its weight in gold in the long run.

But Duke seems pretty appropriate for this TRYHARD, because like a lot of the tryhards before her, she’s got that air of insufferable humblebraggart already down, and that’s precisely the type of people whom Duke would be a great fit for.

The jury’s still out on whether or not she’s getting a free ride or not, I have to guess that it’s probably not entirely free, but it’s also probably not just an acceptance and go fuck yourself, get your own student loans and fall into our trap kind of situation; after all her goal was to not pay for college, but it’s hard to imagine a money printer like Duke actually be willing to give anyone not in athletics a free ride.

Regardless, I hope this girl knows what she’s in for, going to Duke.  As intelligent as she might think she is, Duke is still a notoriously racist and classist environment, and if word gets out that she’s the black girl from the sketchy part of Atlanta, lord only knows what the fuck is going to become of her student life among the snobs and privileged among the Dook Elite.

Well you know what they say, which is something that literally only one friend of mine likes to say, if you TRY HARD, you die hard.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Never too early to start

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Source: 15-year old Texas girl has been accepted into 38 universities, amassing a combined $1.6M in scholarship dollars

I think one of the funniest tropes of #TRYHARDSZN is how often times those reporting on these tryhards, they always try to make it sound like their combined scholarship value is free and clear, and they’re eligible to use all of it on the institution that they ultimately choose.  

No, it doesn’t quite work that way, and just because someone has been accepted to 38 schools and the combined value of the offered scholarships is $1.6M doesn’t mean the person can take the offered scholarships from like Louisiana Tech, Furman, Oregon State and William & Mary and funnel them all into Columbia University.

The probably reality with most of these #TRYHARDSZN stories is that they’re accepted into a lot of higher-tier schools at little to no scholarship dollars at all, and it’s the lower-tier schools in which are offering up free rides or high dollar value scholarships, and the figures are extrapolated to whatever sounds the most impressive when combined together, but I digress.

Back to the story at hand, as tryhard-y as it is, the resume of this 15-year old is pretty impressive.  Graduating from high school at 15, already notching 51 college credit hours, with a 4.0 GPA, and a bunch of extracurricular resume-boosting clubs to boot.

It’s funny to me that one of quotes of someone to vouch for her character is coming from one of her elementary school teachers; considering she was there like four weeks ago, it’s safe to say that they were still a fresh resource to reach out to gauge the character of this student.

Don’t get me wrong, on internet paper, this girl sounds like a very impressive person, to have accomplished so much at such a young age.  But whether it’s her decision or it came at the encouragement of her parents, I’m perplexed on this seeming determination to speed-run through contemporary schooling and get to the stage of adulthood, even if the age is not commensurate.

It’s stated that she was able to get to this point because she didn’t have to complete the eighth grade, fifth grade and kindergarten, by virtue of exams, and I’m thinking, skipping kindergarten??  I vaguely remember kindergarten being merely supervised playing, painting with my hands, nap times where I didn’t once actually nap, and occasional practicing letters and numbers.  

My oldest child who still sleeps in overnight diapers.  She throws tantrums when she thinks she’s getting the smaller half of anything in comparison to her younger sister.  She will be in kindergarten in two years.  I’m amazed that there’s even an option to try to exam out of having to do kindergarten, because I can’t imagine what they’d even examine given the criteria of what kindergarteners do.

The point is, Little Miss Tryhard has basically not been given much of a chance to be a kid in her lifetime, and as impressive as it sounds that she’s basically trying to be Doogie Howser academically, she might accomplish graduating college by 17-18, but when school’s all out, and the only thing really left in life is to pursue a career, she is going to be a guppy in an ocean of inexperience, and when she steps into the working world where everyone is competition, she’s probably not going to be remotely mentally and emotionally prepared for what awaits.

Sure it sounds cool, and I’m sure it feels good to be praised and get a lot of e-accolades from anonymous strangers on the internet because she got accepted into a bunch of unnamed schools, but this is a situation where being such a tryhard can have some severe consequences later in life.

All living things need to breathe, and unwind and decompress from time to time, or else  they’re going to work themselves crazy.  But if you’re tryharding and trying to speed-run life, it’s almost like you’re rushing to get into the rat race, where most everyone becomes miserable and really begins to feel like their lives are on a downward trajectory instead of upward.

Dad Brog (#129): if only I looked good in yoga pants. And were also a woman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
Not directing my beef at maverickmother, she’s probably my favorite of mommy vloggers I’ve come across

I don’t know what it is about my general existence and the algorithms of social media, but quite often, I am spoon-fed a lot of theFacebook/Instagram reels of stay-at-home-moms doing stay-at-home-mom stuff, and when I wasn’t aware of it when I originally saw them, I’m quite familiar whenever I see the acronym, SAHM.

Because I am being spoon-fed this content, I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve seen a lot more mom vlogs than I thought I’d ever see in my life, and the thing is, I feel a tremendous amount of ability to relate to a lot of these moms, because a lot of the shit they do, I do. 

Sometimes, I’ll find myself unconsciously nodding in solidarity at the bullshit moms have to deal with when it comes to cleaning, cooking, the behavior of toddlers and children, and sometimes I’m pretty sure I’ve been downright triggered at the fact that unsurprisingly, there are parents out there that are going through things that I may or may not be going through at the very exact same time as they are.

Here’s the thing though, and where my disposition tends to turn sour: these broads are all stay-at-home-moms, where all of this bullshit is the only thing they have to deal with.  I deal with almost all of the same shit that they go through, and on top of it, I work a full-time corporate job for 8-9 hours a day.

And honestly, the ones that are being spoon-fed to me, I probably make way less money than they do, because if they’re successful enough to be suggested viewing material to others, they’ve accomplished a lot in terms of views, hits and general engagement, and seeing as how mythical wife has been able to monetize her own YouTube pursuits, I can only imagine what a lot of these SAHMs are making when all they have to worry about outside of their homes and kids is generating content, without the constraints of The Man’s slave chain around their neck on top of everything.

Make no mistake though, a lot of these SAHMs know what they’re doing.  At least the ones that are being suggested and fed to people on the internet, they’re almost all of the easy-on-the-eyes persuasion, look good in yoga pants, obviously clean up extremely well, and are appealing to watch by just about anyone.

And this is where I lament on the fact that it’s a shame that I too, could probably clean up on the internet if I looked good in yoga pants, and if I just so happened to be a woman too.  If I were a SAHM, I know that I have the constitution and disposition to be able to commit to churning out content on a regular basis and not eventually abandon it like 99% of so-called content creators on the internet eventually do.

But in my current state as a full-time working male whose physical appearance probably does not appeal to the vast majority of the internet whose pay grades would actually be able to support my own, I don’t think burnt-out-full-time-working-dad (BOFTWD) vlogs would be nearly as fruitful.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: At least he picked an Ivy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Eyeroll: Chicago teenager accepted into six Ivy League schools among others; chooses Harvard

At first, I was about to go ha-ha about how he only got into six of the Ivy League schools, but supposedly this kid only applied to just six of them.  For whatever reason, he did not apply to Brown or Dartmouth, and my thought is that those are the two Ivies that are probably a little too far up north in New England for a black kid from Chicago to feel any comfort at, should he have gone to either of them. 

Still though, going six-for-six on the Ivy League schools he did apply to, yep, that’s still #TRYHARDSZN2024.

Stanford and Morehouse were also named as schools he applied to, and were accepted into, but they do say and more, so we have no definitive number of just how many schools he applied to, and were accepted into, but it’s irrelevant because he still went after 3/4th of the Ivy League and that alone is enough to make any kid a mega tryhard.

The thing is though, in most of these cases, a lot of these mega tryhards do what they do, because they don’t have to pay for application fees, which absolves the most primary of risks of applying to college, and the worst thing that can happen to them is that simply don’t get accepted.  Otherwise, they can sit back and amass acceptance after acceptance, and if the number is impressive enough, they make the internet, and I get to call them mega tryhards, and use them as fodder for the hashtag on a personal brog that nobody reads.

But what I was going to say is that in most of these cases, the kids apply to a thousand schools, get accepted into 50 of them, and ultimately only go to the ones that are actually giving them a free ride.  Sometimes, if the families of these tryhards have some money, they’ll go to one of the more prestigious names they were accepted into, but in most of these cases they’re really phishing for any schools that are willing to give them large scholarships, if not a free ride outright, and ultimately they usually end up going to a lesser-heralded school because free school > student loan entrapment imprisonment debt.

However, this particular kid, has chosen to actually redeem his acceptance into Harvard, of all schools.  This isn’t to say that he wasn’t worthy of some sort of scholarship, but usually in a lot of these mega tryhard stories, the underlying truth is that they were simply accepted, and not necessarily given any sort of incentive.  Such details are not disclosed in this specific story, but what is explained is that he will be playing basketball for Harvard, so there’s always the possibility that he’s getting some degree of scholarship from one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, because he’s decent at hoops.

To which I actually do give this kid some credit for actually cashing in his #TRYHARDSZN2024 ticket to go to one of the most prestigious schools on the planet, and not just doing it for the cheap attention as a publicity stunt.  Go forth, young man, and hopefully you will dominate the lesser-tier competition of Ivy League athletics, instead of getting boiled alive at a school with a real athletic program like the ACC’s Stanford (lol), while gaining one of the most invaluable reputable proofs of education in the world.

But you’re still a mega tryhard.

Wendy’s surging real hard to alienate customers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Scorched earth: starting in 2025, Wendy’s to explore surge pricing, where food costs dynamically change based on varying conditions; time, weather, demand

The knee-jerk reactions of the collective internet are probably exactly what anyone with a sensible brain would expect; full of bile, resentment, disdain, and a whole lot of declarations of never going to Wendy’s again, among other hard statements most feel comfortable spouting off on the internet without.  And absolutely nothing positive or with any hint of praise because nobody is in the 1% of greedy fucks who make these kinds of choices.

And who can really blame anyone for being disappointed and furious over this kind of announcement?  Fast food exists because it’s supposed to be cheap, predictable, reliable to exist, and not something where anyone rolling up to a Wendy’s has to think about not knowing what prices they’re going to see on the menu.

It goes without saying that this is a 100% cash grab, because everyone knows consumers aren’t going to be seeing “the low end” of the pricing model beyond perhaps those weird 30-minute windows in between breakfast and lunch time and lunch time and dinner, and that’s only if the weather conditions aren’t remotely hazardous.  Store personnel probably won’t be seeing any sort of monetary benefit to financial fluctuation, and in fact when some locations actually start losing business due to this reckless idea, their jobs will be where the difference in earnings will be made up from.

Unsurprisingly, most everyone knows it, and those who do, all hate it.  It’s flagrant greed and complete disregard for consumers, whose stress levels are already ratcheted up to the moon due to the completely imbalanced escalations of inflation versus wages.

Now I like Wendy’s food, there’s a reason why they’re one of the few burger joints that still manages to thrive, at least in the Atlanta area.  Burger Kings a few and far between locations, McDonalds is widely regarded as somehow unhealthier than Wendy’s, and there just aren’t enough Dairy Queens to compete against Wendy’s it seems.  Five Guys are already branded being egregiously priced, but at least they don’t (yet) flex their prices based on time and weather conditions.

But the thing is, I go to Wendy’s as frequently as I go to McDonald’s, which is to say practically never.  At least where I am, all the Wendy’s are completely staffed with the dregs of the dregs of society, and they’re completely unreliable, drive-thru lines wrapped around the building, that is if they didn’t decide to close up shop at 8:30 pm when they’re supposed to be Open Late.™  And the last few times I’ve actually eaten their food, as tasty as it is, my body definitely regretted it when I’m waking up at 2-3 am because my digestive system is revolting.

So I’m not concerned with my conviction at being able to further avoid Wendy’s if and when this bullshit surging comes to my area, because I don’t like late night toilet runs that aren’t on my own terms, but I still understand all the salt and all the rage and all the resentment towards the company all the same upon this news coming to light.

Aside from the obvious cash grab that this is, it’s also an obvious phishing expedition; Wendy’s looking for markets where they can hike up costs, based on the markets whose numbers don’t seem to be affected in customer order numbers regardless of price surging.  So probably big cities full of people with deep pockets, where people already spend like they’re out of touch with the classes in a position lower than their own, will inevitably have their general costs raised permanently, because make no mistake, surge pricing will inevitably come to an end, once Wendy’s realizes the maximum price points every region could sustain while not losing too many customers.

So as much as I’d love to see this become the beginning of the end for the company as a whole, and we’ll see some Wendy’s burn to the ground as if there were a Black Lives Matter demonstration going tits up outside them, it’s unfortunately going to end up with a shitty fast food company getting all the information they need in order to jack up their costs and ultimately make even moar money, while the Americans that have no choice but to sustain themselves on fast food, suffer even more.

When news ≠ reality

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

News: Hulk Hogan channels the power of Hulkamania, lifts wrecked car, rescues teenage driver, cures cancer while he’s at it, completely by himself

Reality: Hulk Hogan present at the scene of an accident while most likely his friend more than likely did the actual work of pulling a teenage driver out of a flipped vehicle

You’d think a story like this would get me out of my seat and prepare to strap in and mark out about how amazing and wonderful the power of Hulkamania is and how great Hulk Hogan is, but let’s not kid ourselves anymore.  As much as I love the idea of Hulk Hogan and Hulkamania living forever, the guy himself, Terry Bollea is far from a perfect human being in his own right; made no more prevalent then the NYPost giving him the professional athlete treatment, and inserting this snippet into the footer, much like a baseball player’s statistics in any story that has nothing to do with sport:

WWE released Hogan from his contract in 2015 after audio from a sex tape revealed him uttering the n-word and saying he was “racist, to a point.” He apologized for his remarks.“

I’m not sure how any of that has anything to do with being a Good Samaritan and stopping at the scene of an accident, but in the grand spectrum of things, it was still pretty cool of Hulk Hogan to stop and give a degree of assistance, up for interpretation.

I think the funniest thing is that Hogan hogs the tagline, as if he himself did a completely selfless and heroic act, and that he and only he, lifted the vehicle with his 28” pythons and the power of Hulkamania coursing through his veins, and rescued a damsel in distress.  Obviously this isn’t necessarily by any fault of Hogan himself, a rag like the Post knows what they have to do in order to draw page views.

I have to imagine the actual reality is more along the lines of his friend, who supposedly is a veteran, along for the ride, sees the accident occur, and his protect instinct kicked in and he wanted to act.  And Hogan, always the politician and puppeteer and his (third) wife probably immediately seeing an opportunity to soak up some positive press and get the Hogan name back out into the public eye didn’t hesitate to be on board.

But then you see the few photos of the scene, and it looks pretty clear that Hulk Hogan himself, in an nWo shirt no less, is just kind of standing around and watching.  The friend, who looks younger and fitter, probably is the one who did all of the work, but solely by being the celebrity in the scene, Hulk Hogan gets to absorb the lion’s share of the credit for the act of heroism.

I’m not going to shit on the Hulkster any more than this, but it’s just funny how Hogan, whether he’s trying to or not, still somehow manages to always stay relevant in some way shape or fashion, and this is a good example of it.  All things considered, it was cool that he stopped at all, because I can’t imagine that most people these days want to get involved, and are more apt to drive off and feign ignorance rather than help out.

The work trip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My job is sending me out to California to attend the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. This is pretty cool because I can’t ever say that I’ve been on a work trip such as this before in my life; the last time I skipped town for a work function, it was to like Macon, Georgia where maybe like 12 people from various other satellite offices could meet my entire office when I worked for the state.

But yeah, work trip to California where they’re paying for the flights and the hotel.  You’d think I’d be more excited for this as it’s at the same time a little bit of a forced break from parenting, but I’m not treating this like it’s going to be the greatest experience of my life or anything.  It’s still a conference full of other graphic designers and creative types, and most of my zero readers probably know I have a bit of an eyeroll-ey contentious feeling towards that demographic.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing it for so long that I think most of the bullshit high-up creatives say is full of shit and made up word fluff, or maybe I’m envious of the next generation of creatives and the talent that they bring to the table or maybe a little of both.  But the idea of being a conference full of these types isn’t necessarily my first preference of people to surround myself with, but that’s also probably me just being a curmudgeon about everything that’s usually the norm.

Honestly, the thing I’m looking forward to the most probably shouldn’t be any surprise, but it’s some of the potential food options I’ve scouted out.  Years of seeing drive-by reels of restaurants that usually anywhere but in Atlanta are now within reach, at least for ones found in downtown Los Angeles, or as the kids say, DTLA.  Yeah, I’ve found a few that are within reasonable distance to where I’m staying at, and as god as my witness, it’s my time to get my hands on shit like hot Cheetos loaded quesaritos, twice-wrapped burritos and trash can nachos.

However this isn’t to say that I’m completely no-selling MAX.  Instead of coasting through the event and scheduling nothing but layup workshops of shit in my wheelhouse, I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to schedule as many workshops and seminars of the things I’m not as versed in, so that I can actually maybe learn some shit and get on the path to some career advancement.

All the same, as a whole I really am looking forward to this trip as I’m nearing embarkation.  It’ll be nice to have a little bit of purely alone time, eat some trash I’ve always wanted to try and maybe I’ll learn something useful.