Tag: triggered

Dad Brog (#110): Who knew toddler recitals were like Taylor Swift concerts?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As many parents do, mythical wife and I have enrolled #1 in dance classes, among other extracurricular activities to explore the aptitude and interest of our children to see what they might like.  She definitely seems to enjoy dance, but she’s also just three years old, so it’s way too early to tell what future lies ahead of this pathway, but for all intents and purposes, she’s nearing the completion of her first “year” of dance class.

And of course with dance classes comes an end-of-year recital, and I am looking forward to seeing my little girl up on stage in matching costumes with her peers and seeing just how well (or hilariously bad) she can work in tandem with her class.

All throughout the year, parents are pretty well-informed of everything going on with the program, and as we gear up for recital SZN (they really love to use that phrasing), emails have gone out to remind parents to get ready for ticket registration.  It turns out that the recital isn’t going to be like some local community center or a nearby high school auditorium or something, but they’re renting out an actual university auditorium, and it’ll be capable of seating close to 1,100 people.  Tickets are genuinely at risk of selling out, so we the parents are implored to be ready to register when they’re available at a specific time on a specific date.

Still, I didn’t think much of it, but when I got home, mythical wife explained to me to “be ready,” and that I should probably go get my laptop so that we could log on together.  I’m like, wtf for, isn’t this just a kids’ dance recital?  Why are we preparing for Dragon*Con hotel registration or Comic-Con membership?

I guess being part of moms groups and such have given mythical wife more insight than I have, but apparently getting our dance tickets is a really big deal, and that we should probably be very ready to go once 8pm EST hits.  But I don’t want to miss the opportunity to secure tickets for my daughter’s first recital, so I get ready to go all the same.

Sure enough, by 7:55pm, the website link we’re given to get our tickets from starts being slow to reload, and it’s clear that they’re starting to get bogged down with traffic.  8pm hits, and the button goes live, and it’s a surprising slog to get through.  The seating chart pops up, I enter our code, but I’m noticing that no matter what seats I press, there’s any reaction from the page itself.  I refresh, the site takes forever to repopulate, and the result doesn’t change.

Miraculously, mythical wife is able to get through, and secure four tickets.  However one is out of sequence, and all in all, we need five.  We solder back to the site to try and get the fifth ticket, hopefully in our row, but the site is completely borked.  I refresh and refresh, and get different results of what shows up on the page.  I get sent back to a landing and see to check back ten days later at 8 pm.  Then to check back at 9pm later tonight.  And then eventually, a crash on the page outright, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that fifth ticket.

Now I didn’t try and get Taylor Swift tickets when they went on sale, but I imagine it was just like what I was going through.  It’s apparent that the dance company entrusted their ticket distribution to a company that might as well have been Ticketmaster for as poorly as they go overwhelmed by a bunch of local parents who just wanted to get tickets to see their kids dance.

In all honesty, I’ve had better luck securing hotel rooms for Dragon*Con than I did trying to get tickets for my daughter’s dance recital.  I’ve never failed to get a room whenever I’ve tried, but in my first try to get dance recital tickets, I get shutout.

Apparently, this is the norm for this particular dance company, and if my kid(s) end up liking it and sticking it with the foreseeable future, I suppose I should get ready to get owned again and again for years to come.

Dad Brog #109: My kids seem to only have my weaknesses

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Up until recently, I’ve been thinking that #2 seemed to be the more sturdy of my daughters, seeing as how #1 can’t eat eggs without it coming back out in some unpleasant fashion.  She gets this unfortunate ailment from me, seeing as how almost to the day I turned 30 years old, my body has decided to revolt against eggs.  I can still eat things with eggs as an ingredient to a small extent, but I can’t fry up eggs or hard boil them and eat them without a fairly predictable and unpleasant result a few hours later.

Some say that peoples’ dietary tendencies have a tendency to change every 7-10 years, but it was actually very recently where I indulged in a quiche, and most definitely paid for it later in the day.  A decade later and my body still doesn’t like dealing with eggs any more than when I was 30.

However, not only can #2 eat eggs, she loves them.  Scrambled, fried, Korean-souffle style, she really enjoys eggs, and doesn’t have any ill effects like her sister or dad does.  For that reason alone, I figured she was the more resilient child.

Until just a day ago, I was getting texts from my au pair asking if #2 had any allergies.  Subsequent photos came in, and there were some rashes on my daughter that were unnerving to see, resulting in me leaving work early and taking her in to urgent care, because I wanted to get some professional opinion on what I was already suspecting.

At the tail end of the cruise, my group did a load of laundry on the ship, so that we could get it out of the way while on the ship, as well as the fact that with as many outfit changes my kids were doing, we had to.  As is often the case with lots of cruises, nothing is free, and I had to purchase an individual wash cycle, a dryer cycle, and because we didn’t bring any, some laundry detergent, which was a plain, regular single-serving size of Tide.

Long story short, I quickly pieced things together, and made an educated guess that it was a detergent-related rash that #2 was dealing with, because some articles of clothing from the cruise laundry were coming back into circulation, as well as the fact that, not specifically with Tide, but again, a detergent allergy is something that has happened to me before as well.

In my case, it’s Purex, or whatever the fuck they put in their formula, that triggers my body to have a rather unpleasant hives-ey/rash-ey reaction, and it’s pretty evident that Tide has the same effect on my daughter.

Needless to say, swapping out the afflicted articles and replacing them with not-Tide washed bedding and clothes have already stabilized things, and I’ve learned that Tide is 100% on the blacklist for shopping in the future

But it’s apparent that my second child has picked up a weakness from her dad, just like her sister has.  It’s too early to tell yet, but I’m hoping, considering how much they’re already taking after me, that they get some of my strengths and don’t just continue to grow with weaknesses of mine without any sort of balance.

Dad Brog (#105): when the Karens become real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that many of us of a certain demographic love good Karen stories. Stories of uppity white women making outlandish entitled demands, asking to speak with managers, getting off on generally being pains in the ass to millennials, minorities, and society in general. 

We love when the internet feeds us stories of them, exposing their bullshit, low-key doxxing them and revealing them left and right, but I have to say it’s not nearly as entertaining when the Karens start targeting you, or attacking your personal world, proving themselves to be real-life insufferable c-words, and not just demons from stories on the internet.

On my daughter’s birthday, we went out to eat; a rare occurrence considering my two toddlers, but the grownups outnumbered the runts, so we braved the excursion.  My group was sequestered in a wing of the restaurant that it became quickly apparent that this was where all larger groups, parties with kids, diners needing special accommodation, and ironically, black people (this is a pretty white area), were all stashed away.

The booth seat in which I was sitting at with my daughter, had small openings in the wall behind, that can peek into the booth behind us, if she stood up.  And being a curious now-three year old, of course she stood up and took a peek at the neighboring booth.  Despite my quick admonishing her to not do such, the woman in the adjacent booth wasn’t slow to hide her displeasure at being seated near some young children.

I get it, I’ve been them before too. When I was in my teens and twenties and had no consideration of the challenges of being parents dining out with toddlers.  And she probably was too 40 years prior, the old fucking Karen hag who started making remarks about “it was so empty here” and clearly voicing her displeasure at being near my kids.

I took #1 to the bathroom and when we came back, I noticed that they were gone.  They had moved somewhere else in the restaurant, because they didn’t want to be near my kids.

Here’s the thing, had they stuck it out 10-15 minutes, I wouldn’t have blamed them one bit for wanting to move.  My girls did get noisy for some bursts, and #1 did poke her head over the partition again.  If they moved after those little annoyances, I wouldn’t have taken it as a slight.

But the fact that they did, in advance of any troubling behavior, irked the shit out of me.  It’s like they banked and hoped that my kids would do some mischief to justify their self-important moving so they could continue to have their trite white people conversations about probably how colored folks are ruining their town or some shit.

I felt insulted and unfortunately triggered by it, and it was a stinky moment in what was supposed to be an entirely great dinner with family for my daughter’s birthday. 

Continue reading “Dad Brog (#105): when the Karens become real” →

Re: Lensa, AI artwork and theft

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In most cases, I don’t have much idea of what’s going on in the world other than what I see people talking about on social media.  I simply don’t go out of my way like I used to, to seek out information and the happenings in the world as I occasionally did in the life before children.  However, over the last few days, the topic of some AI art generator, Lensa, has been noticeably a hot topic as far as my digital eyes can see.

Mostly because it’s been determined that Lensa’s art database in which it pulls its art generation from has been built up from billions and billions of images of photos and artwork from the internet, mostly with no sense of consent or permission, which ultimately concludes with the notion that they are using a fuckload of stolen artwork to feed the database.

In this debate, I’ve noticed that there are two very prevalent sides, both of which like in so many cases, have their feet firmly implanted in the mud and neither seemingly willing to yield a single digital e-inch on their opinions.  There’s the side of the creators, the people who have been creating, artwork, or rather content, whose creations have been absorbed and usurped into Lensa’s database without any sort of authorization, and feeding a machine that is spitting out AI-generated results at the beck and call for its increasing base of users.  This is the side of the equation that is unhappy, angry and calling for the cancellation of a service that has stolen the work and creations of countless artists, for use in a, for now, trendy art generator.

On the other side are, what I like to call, are the consumers.  These are the people who have been using Lensa to entertain themselves by creating all sorts of modified images of themselves or whomever they want to process through the Lensa AI.  All of these people are pretty much completely okay with Lensa and where they get their content from, and wish for people to leave Lensa alone and let them have their fun photo generator, regardless of negative perception of what their database is being fed from.

From what I’ve been witnessing, creators are furious because in most cases, many of them can cite examples of their work having already been fed into the Lensa database.  Understandably, they are very unhappy with some AI hoovering up the things they’ve created, and really wish that people, including their friends who fall into the other side to stop using Lensa, and try to educate them to why they shouldn’t.

However, the consumers, are in no rush to stop being Lensa, because regardless of education and regardless of how their artist friends may feel about it, they’re in no rush to stop using it.  It’s giving them entertainment, it’s giving them amusement, but most importantly, it’s giving them content in the form of digitally altered images of themselves in fun and kooky ways, in a variety of art styles generated by AI.  I’ve noticed that these people aren’t the types to just quietly use Lensa and hope nobody judges them for it, but instead are usually the ones who defend it, tell their artist friends to let it go and chill, and we all know how well that goes with people, especially on the internet.

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m of course on the side of the artists.  Out of curiosity, I floated some example images of photos of mine that I’ve known are pretty well seen, and sure enough, they’re populating in the Lensa, which means that I’m also “a victim” of AI theft.  I don’t want to delve deeper, because I know of the thousands of photos and images that I’ve uploaded onto the internet over the last 24 years, lord only knows just how much of my shit has already fed some AI.

I’ve concluded that it’s not really a situation where it’s artists versus Lensa, but really artists versus the narcissism of consumers, and when the day is over, that’s truly an unwinnable battle for those who create.  It’s like cockroaches, you can kill 99 out of 100 roaches in a home, but as long as that 100th cockroach lives, infestation is inevitable to occur again.  Artists can beg and plead with all of their friends and followers to stop using Lensa, but as long as they have the few people who will quietly use it, they’re never going to get any sense of victory in the matter.

Because that’s really all it is, at the root of things.  Consumers like getting fun pictures of themselves and they don’t really care where they’re coming from, and Lensa has, whether by design or not, tapped into a human behavior that is their biggest ally in getting their service off the ground.  The consumers are doing the defense for them, and the artists are exhausting themselves screaming into the aether, and Lensa is quietly growing and spreading without any consequence.

Whether it was intentional or not, it is an ingenious, albeit shithead execution.

Behavioral observations as a new Tesla driver

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

To cut to the chase, I bought a Tesla.  Okay, it’s really my wife’s car and she’ll be the one making the payments on it, but on paper, I’m the purchaser, since I don’t have student loans and my credit was more optimal to get the financing done.  But we have a Tesla, and I get to drive it around every now and then.

It hasn’t been long, but it’s definitely a fun new toy to drive around in.  There’s definitely an adjustment period getting used to regenerative braking, and how you can literally drive with your foot on a single pedal.  The feeling of there being no gears shifting at all as you accelerate, and the sheer lack of sound of motors or smells of exhaust definitely makes you feel like you’re driving a spaceship.

Without question, there’s still a treasure chest worth of experience yet to be tapped as far as diving deeper into ownership of our Tesla, and I’m sure weeks, months and maybe years down the line, there will be functions and features that we’ll still be discovering, and hopefully none that will have been gamechangers early in our ownership.

But the point of this post is about behavioral observations that I’ve had, now that I’ve been driving around in the Tesla myself for a few weeks now.  I didn’t really think much about it after experiencing some observations, I guess I can kind of understand what’s going on around me whenever I, or my wife are riding around in the Tesla.

  1. Surrounding drivers are more aggressive. This is really the big thing that I’ve noticed the most when driving around myself.  Turning on a turn signal to initiate a lane change, way more frequently than I’ve noticed in any other car I’ve been in or driven, results in adjacent drivers stepping on the gas to forcibly deny me entry.  If at a merge point, surrounding drivers are noticeably more aggressive and out to make sure they get ahead of me, regardless of our spatial positioning.  At stop lights, in just the last two weeks, I’ve had more people act like they’re Brian O’Connor on me, and turn a green light into an impromptu drag race, and seemingly make a point of getting in front of me like they just won the le Mans.  I’m all like, buddy, I’m still trying to learn the pedal of this car, I’m definitely not trying to get in any races here.  Plus, I’m 40 with kids, I’m long past caring about 95% of red light matchups.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’ve pushed the pedal a few times, and the acceleration is staggering.  In most cases, I probably could smoke a lot of the cars that have gone Dom Toretto on me, but just because I could doesn’t mean that I am, especially where I’m still new to this and learning about the car.

    But I don’t know if it’s the color of the car, or the notion that all Tesla drivers must be rich assholes, but it’s pretty undeniable that drivers all around me, when I’m in the Tesla, have their aggression ramped up like that one cheat code in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City where you can make everyone super aggressive.

Continue reading “Behavioral observations as a new Tesla driver” →

Dad Brog (#095): An unsustainable pace

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I write because I can’t really talk to anyone anymore.  My wife doesn’t need to hear any of these diatribes, and frankly I really don’t think anyone can relate, as ludicrous as it sounds to single myself out as a special little snowflake in a world of several billion.  And if anyone can, I don’t know them so it might as well not be anyone. 

My family that are all parents and have multiple kids, the age gap between us all is practically an entire generation.  Of all my parenting friends, almost none of them have more than one kid.  The ones that do, their kids are spaced out in age way greater than mine.  And there’s nobody else I know with two kids born during coronavirus-era as close apart as mine.  I’m not trying to say that my problems are greater than anyone else’s like some sadistic internet pissing contest, but COVID really is this difficulty multiplier that stands at the end of every factoid, ready to make everything worse than it might have been for anyone else who didn’t have to deal with things during a pandemic.

But I have been living my life at a fairly unsustainable pace for a while now, as far as keeping my shit together goes.  I try really, really hard on a daily basis to do such, and I have good days, but I definitely am the first to admit that I have some bad ones too, where it just feels like a lot of shit just piles up all at once, and I’m left standing there while my kids are screaming, clocks are ticking, I’m late for school drop off which makes me later for work, and there’s no end in sight.

I’m 99% sure my eldest is sick again.  There’s a small chance that she just never recovered from the cold she had a week ago, but the frequency in which she’s sneezing and her nose is runny again leads me to believe that she’s just plain fucking sick again, which means some more fuckface parents of the kids in my daughter’s school are continually sending their kids to school with plagues.

The problem with that, aside from their selfish and inconsiderate behavior that I can only hope for some divine retribution for, is that when #1 gets sick, it’s basically a death sentence for #2 that she is going to get sick 2-3 days later.  And then my sitter will nope out because they don’t want to get sick which means I’ll have to call in sick because mythical wife’s career is rigid and can’t call in at the drop of a hat, which makes me look even flakier and unreliable, and I have to deal with days of dad double duty, and working after hours.  And then it’s back into the toilet bowl of despair of how much life can suck because of the actions of other people.

Days like today, I’m just burnt out.  I’ve been on baby duty for what feels like an endless length of time, due to the fact that we had two kids in such rapid succession.  #2 is always wanting to be near big sis, and moving them apart is like trying to keep magnets apart, based on how she will rubber band back to wherever #1 is, accelerating the inevitability of transmission.  #1 is frustrated and fussy because she’s sneezing like crazy and her nose is running like a faucet and doesn’t understand why I have to try and isolate her on the other side of the room but can’t trust her with markers or Play-Doh, and I just want to jump off a bridge.

I haven’t had a break in a long time.  A day in which I can wake up on my own without any alarms or dog or kids, no long-ass car rides to retrieve kids, or anything that’s remotely time sensitive.  A single day where I can wake up as not a dad, have a day where I can leisurely do the shit I want to do without any clocks looming over my head, and have the ability to sit and stare at a wall if I wanted to.  There have been some mini-breaks, some afternoons or evenings without the kids, but I’m still having to do one of the above tasks on them regardless.

I just can’t recharge or unwind, and haven’t been able to for well over a year now, and I don’t know if that’s really unhealthy or uncommon, or if I’m just being a melodramatic parent who needs to be made aware that there are millions of dads in similar boats that I just don’t know personally.  But today is definitely one of those days where just enough bullshit has been added to my bags to drag me under and leave me feeling drowning again.

I am all in for Gus Fring as Professor X

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Giancarlo Esposito reveals that he has had meetings with Marvel people for a future role, expresses desire to be Professor X

My knee-jerk reaction to the idea of Gus Fring being Professor X, was absolutely all aboard the train.  I get that aside from Captain Picard, the role of Charles Xavier was basically designed to be for Patrick Stewart, but in the age and in light of pursuing change and pursuing the future, I’m hard pressed to imagine anyone more succinctly qualified for the role of Professor X than Giancarlo Esposito.

Like many, my first real exposure to Esposito was him playing Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, and as far as characters go, he’s easily up there as some of my all-time favorites, because I love characters that are cerebral, command respect, and play the long game like a chess grandmaster.  I get that throughout his career since, he’s basically been bad guy after bad guy after bad guy, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe that he wouldn’t be capable of playing the cerebral, respect commanding, long game-player like Professor X, plus it’s not like Xavier didn’t make some fucked up choices in his life either.

Esposito is polished, annunciates intelligently and in the manner you’d expect to hear from Professor X, and has been entrenched in sci-fi/comics long enough to where it probably wouldn’t feel inorganic or phony on his part when playing the role.  There is absolutely zero reason why he wouldn’t make an excellent Professor X.

Unfortunately, to no surprise, there are plenty of people out there that don’t agree with my enthusiasm for the idea of Gus Fring as Professor X.  And the funny-not-really-funny thing about the internet and social media and how we’re spoon-fed occasional comments, is when you see the remarks from people you know, and you’re reading words that don’t really sound that intelligent or, in the case of what I saw, were good examples of peoples’ white privilege soaking through the sponge.

Because in spite of many peoples’ best attempts to try not to be racist but not doing a very good job of doing it, the seemingly number one reason for any sort of opposition of the idea of Giancarlo Esposito as Professor X, really boils down to the fact that he’s not white.  I understand that there’s an expectation set by decades of seeing a lily-white Caucasian Professor X in comics and FOX properties, but we live in a world where change is inevitable and is happening very rapidly.  But you could go back to 1963 and change the skin tone of Professor X to absolutely any color at all, and it wouldn’t have altered the course of history one bit.

He’d still have has had his legs crushed by the Shadow King.  He still would have gone toe-to-toe with Phoenix on the psychic plane.  He still would’ve gotten shot by Stryfe and been the first guy to have the Legacy Virus.  He still would’ve mind-fucked hundreds of people and become Onslaught.  And so forth and so forth.  A black Xavier, Hispanic Xavier, Asian Xavier wouldn’t have changed the course of the character’s history one bit.  Just because he was white in six decades worth of comic books doesn’t mean he couldn’t be presented as non-white in what would be at the very most, a series of films.

But seeing people take shots at his polish, his acting ability and other reasons to criticize the guy when they’re really just objecting to the fact that his skin tone doesn’t match Ben Affleck’s, is insulting and is bullshit.  When the day is over, the right performer should be the one to get the role, regardless of the color of their skin.  I mean, look at the shitty 2003 Daredevil speaking of Ben Affleck.  The film was horrendous, but one of the few things they did get right was casting a very black Michael Clarke Duncan as the role of the historically very white Kingpin.  Regardless of skin color, Duncan is a tank of a man who commands a room, has swag and is convincingly physically invincible, much like the character he portrayed.  Naturally, there was much complaints about that as well, but to its credit it still came to fruition.

Plus, Patrick Stewart isn’t getting any younger.  Y’all remember seeing his cameo in [spoiler redaction]?  Eyes all sinking in with age, not entirely sure the wheelchair was just a prop.  When he was a layup for the role of Professor X, those Bryan Singer X-Men flicks were literally two decades ago.  Stewart is 82 years old.  Eighty-two years old.  At the very most, Professor X was probably in his early fifties in the comics, in “present” canon.  Absolutely no disrespect to Picard.  He is the living embodiment of how Professor X was originally portrayed.  But my man is getting old.  He is old.  He doesn’t need to be continued to be trotted out, and then get the digital Luke Skywalker treatment.  Let the change happen.  Change.  Is.  Needed.

Hopefully the stiffs at Disney/Marvel/ESPN/FOX will be capable of not caving into their white racist brethren when it comes time to eventually start casting for the introduction of mutants into the MCU, and make the right fucking call: Giancarlo Esposito as Professor X.