Tag: trolls

I’m over having my Star Wars fandom invalidated

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m a fan of Star Wars.  This shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise, as I am very nerdy and have many nerdy interests.  However, throughout the years, I have been told that I am “not as much of a fan” of Star Wars as other people because of a myriad of reasons, with more recently because I don’t have a strong definitive opinion about The Last Jedi.*  Or the fact that I’m not remotely associated with the 501st or have a Rebellion or Empire sticker tattooed on me or brandished on my car.

*I didn’t think it was the best SW film, but I have not declared a jihad against it either

With the standalone Solo film around the corner, I’ve noticed people on social media being super curmudgeon about its release, and how they’re going to make zero effort to watch it and have basically denounced Star Wars as a franchise.  Or any other rhetoric along those lines.  I mean that’s fine and all that they’re not looking forward to it, but I think it’s a little excessive to be lifting a leg and farting all over those people who don’t take SW as serious as a religion.  Perhaps consider learning how to temper expectations, because even the best people in their fields don’t bat 1.000, and it’s only with the possibility of failure where the cream of the crop can truly rise.

But because I tend to not be so extreme in any direction about my excitement or apprehension about Star Wars, or anything really, I often get accused of being something of a filthy casual fan, who knows little about the franchise, and whose opinion about the franchise doesn’t matter as much as someone who, has SW tattoos, emblems on their car, or dresses up as Stormtroopers at Dragon*con.

The thing is, just because my fandom in Star Wars isn’t as vocal, as outwardly or so open to the rest of the world doesn’t mean that I’m no less of a fan.  I could name planets that aren’t mentioned in the canon films like Kashyyyk.  I played my fair share of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and Knights of the Old Republic.  There has been a lot of Star Wars in my life over the years, it’s just that I’m not so obnoxiously outward with it as the whole rest of the narcissistic world is.

Continue reading “I’m over having my Star Wars fandom invalidated” →

Now that’s some hardcore ownage

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Applause for draconian punishment: dumbass teenager who threw a firework that resulted in a gargantuan forest fire sentenced to pay $36 million dollars in restitution

Step aside, Smokey.  You ain’t done SHIT in 64 years.  Kids have continued to play with fire and idiots have continued to inadvertently start fires that have resulted in god knows how much damage and carnage to nature throughout the last century.

But Hood River County Circuit Judge John A. Olson sentencing a 15-year old to pay $36 million dollars in restitution?  Now THAT’S going to make some dumbasses think twice on whether or not it’s worth playing with fire and risk starting a blaze and getting caught and facing the gavel themselves.

I really love this story, because far too often, America has seen people who have done terrible things get away with merely metaphorical slaps on the wrists.  Draconian punishments would undoubtedly make people think twice or three or four times on whether or not a bad choice is worth the punishment, and if only America would go a little dark side and apply more of them, then maybe this country wouldn’t be so full of shitheads.

Continue reading “Now that’s some hardcore ownage” →

I think I’m a Trevor Bauer fan

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think I hide the fact that when it comes to baseball, as much as I like the broad stroke enjoyment of the game such as visiting new ballparks, seeing a power hitter clobber a home run, and seeing a walk off victory, I take a tremendous enjoyment in the smallest things as well.  Things that seem too small and insignificant that they hardly can be said to have occurred at all, but when you know what to look for and see it happen and know what might or might not happen as a result, it’s no less enjoyable.

In other words, there’s a tremendous amount of nerdy shit that I love about baseball that aren’t the flashy, most attractive things about the game like home runs, strikeouts and throwing 100 miles per hour.  That said, every now and then on the internet, there will be stories and articles about baseball that aren’t talking about the Boston Red Sox’s hot start, the home run potential of the New York Yankees, or the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County, Anaheim via Interstate 5 South’s Shohei Ohtani, but something more intricate and harder to comprehend for the casual baseball fan, and these are the ones that tend to pique my interest, or at least be reliable for a good 10-minute read.  Stories about like overlooked statistics and baseball skills, the intangible evidence of clubhouse chemistry, and some other real Moneyball Doctor Manhattan kind of shit.

Throughout the last few years, among the more interesting stories that have come and gone within the game of baseball, there’s been a name that I’d been seeing popping up sporadically: Trevor Bauer, a starting pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.  I’m pretty sure it started when he was in a game where he passively mimicked the batting stances of several of his teammates in a game, which was noteworthy solely for the fact that he is an American League pitcher having some fun with his at-bats during Interleague playing in a National League ballpark.  Baseball sometimes tends to take itself too seriously sometimes, so I could appreciate a guy like Bauer who manages to find some way to have some fun and bring some laughs into the glorified kids’ game.

Then there was this story about how a baseball player helped a baseball fan with her math homework over Twitter, and lo and behold, it was Trevor Bauer.  It was here did I learn that Bauer went to UCLA and was pretty much a pretty smart nerd, and if there were ever a type of player that I tend to favor, it’s the brainy types that embrace knowledge and learning as opposed to just believing that god and their natural talent can carry their careers.  And the fact that Bauer took the time to do something so simple and meaningful to a young fan, it’s endearing in my opinion.

Continue reading “I think I’m a Trevor Bauer fan” →

The whitest, most privileged feud since Duke vs. Yale

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Have your slave butler get the popcorn: the NRA is outraged with the YETI cooler company for deciding to cease their partnership as an NRA vendor, demands that their mindless, gun-crazy followers and underlings boycott

Is there anything more entertaining than two icons of things white people like feuding with each other?  In one corner, we have the YETI cooler company, the fairly young company that manufactures supposedly high-end coolers and drink receptacles that white people go gonzo over.  And in the other corner, we have the ageless and timeless National Rifle Association, the biggest punching bag save for the president himself for the left, rife with criticism for the fact that there’s a shooting almost every single day, primarily by white people, but that doesn’t change the fact that the alleged majority of NRA due-paying members are white.

And at first blush, it looks like the young white company has decided to distance its partnership with the company helmed primarily by old white people, and the old white people are none too happy about it.

Honestly, this does make YETI look a little more favorable in my eyes.  No, this isn’t going to make me drop what I’m doing and go drop $200 on a fucking cooler, when a $5 Styrofoam gas station box and 50¢ worth of ice accomplish the exact same thing, but it will take YETI out of my crosshairs as something to criticize because I for the life of me can’t comprehend why white people go so bonkers over a company that makes overpriced coolers and has the branding of all caps Arial Black on a black rectangle that makes me wonder what the fuck I’m doing with my career; yeah, it’ll prevent me from elaborating on that thought, with 700 more words.

But it doesn’t change the fact that seeing a good old fashioned white-on-white conflict makes me giddy with ironic anticipation at seeing two sissies getting into a slap fight.

Seriously, YETI vs. the NRA is the best white-on-white feud I’ve seen since Duke got paired up against Yale in the 2016 Men’s NCAA basketball tournament. 

Continue reading “The whitest, most privileged feud since Duke vs. Yale” →

You know what fucking sucks?  Live tweeting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was Sunday, April 9th, 2018.  I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for my flight from Orlando to Atlanta to start boarding so we could begin our journey back home.  Mythical gf and I had just spent a lovely weekend at Disney World where we couldn’t possibly have gotten any better weather than we did.  We dined on a lobster bake at Disney Springs, imbibed in refreshing beverages at the Hangar Bar.  We leisurely ate around the floral world at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, and I caught a Heracross in Pikachu Game, the South American exclusive while there.  And due to some strategic planning on account of some typical Florida rain, we managed to ride the Avatar ride that typically has anywhere from a 3-4 hour wait with regularity, in under an hour.

It was a lovely trip.

However, Sunday, April 9th 2018 was also the same day that Wrestlemania 34 was scheduled.  Obviously, seldom am I ever going to prioritize a wrestling show over mythical gf, and I didn’t even bother crosschecking when WM was going to be when we planned our trip, not that it would have impacted anything in the least bit.  But the fact of the matter was that I still wanted to watch the show when I got back home and had a good 3-6 hours of free time because when taking into account of TakeOver and the pre-show and all the promos, who really knows how much time the ‘rasslin is going to account for.

This is often how I keep up with wrestling these days, watching things after they’ve aired, so that I can really flesh out the main storylines and plots without having to sit through all the commercials and extraneous fluff.  Obviously, I run the risk of encountering spoilers on a regular basis, but seeing as how WWE programming runs every single week, and multiple times a week, and the fact that personally I don’t know a tremendous amount of people that are really still into wrestling, it’s typically never really a problem to indulge in wrestling the way I do.

Except, when it comes to the big pay-per-view shows; like Summer Slam, the Royal Rumble, or, Wrestlemania.

Continue reading “You know what fucking sucks?  Live tweeting” →

I love how big of pussies white supremacists are

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
Fun fact: scenes from Zombieland were filmed in downtown Newnan where the Nazi rally is planned

The Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming!  On April 21, 2018, the National Socialist Movement is holding a rally in Newnan, Georgia.

Oh goody.

Ironically, I’m long past being shocked and appalled by news like this.  It was more of a surprise that it’s kind of taken this long for a white supremacist rally to happen in Georgia that’s become somewhat nationally known.  Despite the fact that Atlanta is pretty blue and predominantly black populated, there’s no denying that the further one gets outside of the perimeter, the redder and more white redneck the rest of the state becomes.

The biggest takeaway I get from the news of white supremacists converging on Georgia right around my birthday is the location in which they chose to conglomerate at, Newnan.  It’s almost laughable just how cowardly and spineless this gathering is, taking place in Newnan, instead of anywhere remotely closer to Atlanta, where the chances of liberal and/or minority intervention go up exponentially. 

Continue reading “I love how big of pussies white supremacists are” →

Have Lexus drivers passed BMW for biggest assholes?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the better part of the last two decades, if anyone were to ask me what drivers were the worst drivers in the world, my automatic reaction would typically have been “Maryland drivers.”  But upon clarification of asking which automotive manufacturer has the biggest assholes that drive their cars, my answer becomes “oh, BMW drivers.”

BMWs have always been at a price point to where even the drivers of the low-end 3 series still felt validated to turn their noses up to everyone not willing to drop $35k (then) on a glorified Jetta.  Some of them were legitimately high-performing, and all of them came with a degree of luxuries that when combining all of the above, had a tendency to foster a sense of entitlement and arrogance from those that drove them. 

And it was no more indicative than watching the average BMW driver drive amidst the pleebs of the world; they’d cut people off without using signals, aggressively tailgate cars deemed inferior to their marvels of German engineering, and demonstrate all sorts of driving behavior that exuded me-first selfish and dickish attitudes.  It really didn’t matter who was driving the car, be it a white man, black woman, Asian teenager or an elderly Hispanic; once behind the wheel of a BMW, it’s like there’s a needle in the seat that goes straight up the driver’s asshole and plugs into a very specific node inside the body that triggers all sorts of degenerate behavior, thus fulfilling the destiny of BMW drivers all have to be assholes.

However, ever since I moved back into the ‘burbs, I’ve often been moderately fascinated at the sheer differences of my surroundings compared to my previous foray in homeownership.  Which is a nice way of saying that I now live in a slightly upper-middle class exuding white privilege which is overwhelmingly predominantly white, versus my old community which unfortunately sank into really lower-middle class that was overwhelmingly predominantly black, which in itself is a nice way to say that everyone in the neighborhood was black, and then there was Jen and myself.

Continue reading “Have Lexus drivers passed BMW for biggest assholes?” →