Tag: lowered expectations

When the day is over, you just have to do the shit yourself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because my mental being can’t handle loose ends, I decided to take it upon myself to put back up my own fucking fence, so that it’s one less thing that I’ll have to dump money into when it comes time to (hopefully) finding someone competent to fix shit around my house.  As mentioned before, in the process, I fucked up my finger pretty bad, but fortunately it wasn’t in a state where I couldn’t just bandage it up, wear gloves and not be able to continue working.

To summarize, among the shit that the clown of a “handyman” I “hired” to fix my window did, was not just remove several fence panels,  but also damage the posts in in the process of fishing the $450 scissor lift rental I made on his request, off of my backyard, which also tore the shit out of my turf (photos below).  He claimed that he would take responsibility for the damages, but shocking nobody, he’s been as evasive and vague as an extreme cheapskate when the bill shows up, about when he’s actually coming to do anything, and frankly I don’t actually believe he’s going to do anything, and I’m going to light him up on the internet and hope it hurts his future business, because an asshole like this doesn’t need to be out there pretending to be a respectable handyman.

During the days of ghosting, I would step outside and just look at the unfinished job of the fence, and get madder and madder, and I realized that this was not good for my mental state.  Just because I didn’t want to do it didn’t mean that I wasn’t capable of doing it, and considering the sloppy nature of this guy in the first place, it would probably be in the best interest if I did it myself, to ensure that it would be done well.

So janky finger injury aside, I assessed where things stood, and came to the conclusion that this was one of those situations where I would just have to do this shit myself.

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A 2020 MLB Arizona-only short season: greed personified

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know that over the last few years, baseball has definitely fallen pretty hard in terms of priorities in my life, but it’s still my favorite sport, and I’ll always have an ear to the ground in regards to it.  I’ll also include that the lack of the pomp and circumstance of the Opening Day that didn’t happen is mostly lost on me, because of the whole, having a baby owning my life from here on until the indefinite future, but it’s still a sad state of affairs that this is the time of the year in which baseball should be shining the brightest, but thanks to coronavirus, is nowhere to be seen.

Naturally, within the inner workings of baseball and their respective organizations, there are massive repercussions to not having a season; fans don’t get to enjoy watching the national pastime, ballparks all across the country sit dormant as the beautiful spring days and nights come and go, and of course, there are billions of dollars being lost all across the board from there being no baseball.

Ballparks large and small, major league, minor league, semi-pro, etc, make no money on parking, concessions and tickets when there is no baseball.  The local economies that house and surround said ballparks also feel the pinch from there being no focal point to draw traffic to them.  People who work in the ballparks and any businesses that rely on baseball to bring in money, end up suffering and worse, jobless as a result.

And when everything culminates, above all else, the owners, investors and other partners who run baseball organizations and the teams themselves, aren’t making money when there’s no baseball being played.

What’s kind of messed up is that baseball players, are still getting paid in spite of the shutdown.  For doing jack shit nothing at this point, as they can’t really train, since the places they’d go train at are all also shutdown.  Sure, the Bryce Harpers and the Manny Machados aren’t going to be getting their full $30M+ salaries for the year, but it’s reported that quite a few players are making up to $143K a week for doing the aforementioned nothing.

But anyway, the point of this post comes from some news that’s been bubbling over the last few weeks about how Major League Baseball is kicking an idea around, that would attempt to get baseball back onto the field as soon as possible, even if it had some really extreme guidelines about it.

Basically, in this proposal, the entire 2020 MLB season would take place over the span of 4-5 months starting in July or August and go through presumably November.  But here’s the real crazy part of it: all 30 teams would be playing in various stadiums all across Arizona.  And possibly Florida.  Or maybe just Arizona.  The point is, MLB wants to play as much of an entire season as possible in either just Arizona, or they’ll do Arizona and Florida and use the Spring Training Cactus and Grapefruit leagues as two divisions and then mash together a World Series at presumably a neutral site.

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Thoughts on Cobra Kai S2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: there will probably be spoilers.  Despite the fact that this has little chance of being public for a long time.

Over the weekend, I shotgunned through season 2 of Cobra Kai.  I admit that I liked season 1 more than I thought I would, but it had no shortage of some eyerolling moments that were both funny, but tickled the nostalgia factor to where it was somewhat acceptable. 

However, after the first season, I was very dubious and had plenty of doubts about the direction of the show going into the second season.  As clever as the writing of the first season was, it was somewhat predictable, and I had some very strong predictions going into S2.  Needless to say, given the fact that I had low expectations that were surpassed going into the first season of the show, I was kind of back to being skeptical about the quality of the second.

Ultimately, the vast majority of the things I predicted about S2 of Cobra Kai, basically came true.  The return of John Kreese at the end of S1 meant that there would be something of a faction system within the dojo.  The cheesy love triangle between Samantha, Miguel and Robby came true, although it kind of turned into a square with the introduction of the pleasantly surprising Tory character.  Johnny would get involved with Miguel’s mom, and Daniel LaRusso would have some personal struggles balancing his hectic professional life with the world of karate.

I had all of these predictions, and every single one of them came true.  The writing of the first season basically laid the groundwork down for each of them, and the it’s been so linear, that it’s almost more impossible to deviate from it than let it ride its course.

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If this is what constitutes acceptable design, I need to change careers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

what the fuck is this shit

Were the exact words that my brain said when I looked at the new Creative Loafing Atlanta website.

I thought maybe the site had been hacked or something, and whatever Russian or Chinese hacking organization was deliberately using a 4-bit retro Oregon Trail looking interface as their ransom page demanding some Bitcoins in exchange for control over their website again, but after a few minutes, not seconds, of figuring out how the new navigation worked, it was pretty much confirmed that this was in fact, the new Creative Loafing Atlanta.

To cut to the chase, this is basically the worst redesign that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  It’s worse than when Pepsi tried to use the Golden Ratio and the Vitruvian Man to explain their logo, which was pretty bad considering it literally cost Pepsi $1.4 million dollars for a PowerPoint so inflated with bullshit that it could have incinerated Palo Alto if it caught on fire.  But that’s just a logo, on a line of products that lots of people otherwise enjoy to indulge in regardless of what logo was slapped onto the bottles.

Creative Loafing Atlanta was already a publication in more or less rag status, and they’re an entity that can’t really afford to fuck up on design when whether people admit it or not, love to judge books by their covers.  And yet, here we stand, with a website that looks like an unintentional glitch, or your monitor fell face first and when you propped it back up, pixels are dead and busted, resulting in the horrific interface that currently loads.

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When a movie is treated like more than a movie

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really planning on going out and seeing Wonder Woman.  Not because I’m a sexist pig that refuses to support a film with a strong leading woman, but because I’m just not really that interested.  One, it’s a DC Comics film, and I know there’s a fallacy of predicting the future based on the past, but if the last few stinkers were any indication, it’s probably not going to be that great.  And two, the monumental amount of attention and press that this film has received, regardless of it was actually about the film or not, has put this movie on a plateau of expectations that I just don’t think can realistically be reached.

Had Wonder Woman just been released like any other comic book movie, I might’ve had more interest in seeing it.  I mean, this variant of Wonder Woman was introduced in such an epic manner, giving a modicum of life and interest to the steamer known as Batman v. Superman, that it really shouldn’t have been too difficult to expect that a stand-alone Wonder Woman should be just fine.

Now I know that as a man, it’s not really my place to speak on behalf of women, but I still have a lot of opinions on how the buildup and arrival of this movie has basically taken on a life greater than the film itself, and I think that it’s kind of unfair to the film and those who worked on it, that it’s being treated as anything other than a feature film that people will pay money to hope to be entertained by, and little else.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Gal Gadot is awesome.  If anything at all, I feel like I’ve been a fan of hers longer than most sudden Wonder Woman fans are, because I’ve enjoyed her throughout the later Fast & Furious films, where she plays Gisele, who isn’t just eye candy, but another strong female protagonist not defined by her role in the lives of men.  I know she served in the Israeli army, which explains why she’s so rock hard and convincingly tough, because she actually is, and nobody needs to give me an elaborate dossier for me to know that I appreciate her.

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Xbox achievements are lame now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back in the ancient days of the Xbox 360, I really enjoyed Xbox achievements. I spent way more time than I care to admit trying to lock down every single achievement in Left 4 Dead.

I used exploits to assist in beating Expert, I changed the difficulty to Easy to farm massive numbers of zombies to kill, and all sorts of tactics to nail down all available 1,000 gamer points.

There was once a night where I managed to wrangle together seven other people, and we played a patsy of a 4v4 game, where we all took turns trying to farm down achievements, such as the one that involved puking on all four survivors simultaneously, one special infected incapacitating all four survivors, and so forth.

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Out of sight, out of mind

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So, what I had feared might have happened, did happen; with my site down for the indeterminate amount of time it’s been down, I’ve simply stopped writing.  Not only have I really stopped writing, I haven’t even given much thought about writing until I really sat down and started writing this.  As this post is entitled, out of sight, out of mind.

I do not want to get used to this.

However, I can’t necessarily say it’s a terrible thing that such has happened, as since the brog’s temporary offline status has taken effect, I’ve actually been pretty busy in my daily everyday life’s affairs, likely to the point of where anything that I would’ve posted, probably wouldn’t have been of much quality that appeases my personal standards in the first place.  I won’t really get into everything that’s happened since the period of time in which the brog was operational, but I will say that most all of it has been positive.

More than a lot of people that know me might expect.

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