Tag: trolls

A fine example of why social media is fucking trash

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: Donte DiVincenzo plays the game of his life, leads Villanova to the NCAA men’s basketball national championship.  Shortly afterward, an offensive tweet from seven years ago emerges amidst the celebration.

This is a perfect example of why social media is fucking garbage.  A guy can’t enjoy the best night of his budding career without having to address teenage behavior from seven years ago that some fuckheads took the time to seek out in order to deliberately piss on a joyous celebration.

I’m not entirely sure why this story has set me off, it’s no secret that I think social media is a cancer on society.  I guess I take objection to the idea that on a night where a guy performs legendarily and achieves success, that there are people who are such assholes that they exert actual effort in order to look for a way to throw a wet blanket on someone’s well-earned celebrating.

Maybe it’s because DiVincenzo’s story was so epic; a second-stringer who came off the bench in the National Championship game and went completely bonkers, and shit on Michigan harder than Chris Webber calling for timeout, that who doesn’t want a guy like that to be able to enjoy the night where he had the game of his life and led his team to a national championship?

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Individual tweets, are somehow news today

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure it’ll be a shocker to know that I abhor social media, and that I pretty much think it’s a metaphorical cancer on the entire god damn planet.  I feel like just about everything terrible in the world now can be traced back to something related to social media, or that social media inevitably takes most things and somehow inexplicably finds every single way to make them worse than in which they started.  Behind screens and occasional veils of anonymity, either people feel emboldened to be shitheads, or perhaps their true selves emerge when they feel the safest, outside of arm’s reach to the people they choose to fling stones at.

The bottom line is that social media tends to steer things into the tragically negative, rather than the one out of a hundred cases in which social media manages to do something good, to which the they’ll still get twisted into misguided and greedy intentions by association.

The problem is, social media has become so prevalent and commonplace in the world today, it’s become a primary source for news and general content.  I’ve always made the analogy that social media has turned the entire planet into America Online, except that instead of subscribers holed in their houses looking for poorly photoshopped pictures of Kathy Ireland or Teri Hatcher naked, the vast majority of the modern world is connected to AOL, with shitty screen names, and the capability to IM one another or the entire world as a whole, at any given moment they feel like it, and they most certainly capitalize on such immediacy.

However, whereas in the past if celebrities, athletes or known figures were AOL subscribers, like hell would they let just anyone know what their screen names were.  The last thing they would want is to have their email box pinging YOU’VE GOT MAIL every two seconds from fans, admirers and haters to have access to a direct line of communication with them.  Somehow in this day and age it’s quite the contrary, and people who are known can’t not broadcast their online handles enough, with Twitter handles being the subtitle on just about any source of communication, and a seeming requisite space requirement on every form of marketing these days to account for a Twitter handle, Instagram handle, Facebook URL and whatever other social media platforms a person or entity feels the need to shill themselves on.

Obviously, I’m veering off point, as is often the norm when I rant, because my disdain at what started this train of thought snowballed a little off the original rails.  But I was looking through my news feed this morning, and for some reason, surprisingly high on the morning’s recommended reads, was this link about AN AMAZING TWITTER CONVERSATION.  I mean that’s already an oxymoron in itself because almost nothing on fucking Twitter can really be classified as amazing in my opinion, but I guess I was curious to see what fluffy bullshit could possibly be constituted as “news.”

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The America we live in

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Typically, I try not to write things that are remotely political in nature, but ultimately the point of my brog is to have a space in which I write out my thoughts, and whether six people read my words or zero people read them, it’s still an exercise in putting my thoughts into words and occasionally seeing if I can get any further clarity out of expressing them.

It’s hard to ignore and remain silent on the topic of gun control, considering the latest episode of American Massacre involved a bunch of high school students and faculty getting gunned down by a mentally unstable person who somehow had possession of an AR-15 automatic assault rifle.  I don’t mean to sound ignorant and uneducated in all the facts, but the truth is that I have not gone out of my way to learn more than the surface facts of the whole tragedy because frankly I don’t want to get too detailed in what I already know is a horrific incident that could probably have been prevented if not for the simple fact that firearms, and extremely deadly firearms, are just way too fucking accessible in America.

Ultimately, I’m fine with handguns and the general guidelines of the Second Amendment.  Believe me, I thought long and hard about acquiring a gun after some stupid shitheads kicked in my front door with the intent to rob my house, except that I was home when it happened, and they ran instead of seeing if I were packing or not when I came running down my hallway.  However, my thoughts were always a handgun, or a shotgun at most, and only one.  Not a weapon that a Taliban fighter would be carrying on their person at all time, or any weapon that would be available by default in first-person horde shooter.

I don’t think assault weaponry needs to be available to the public in any capacity, yet here we stand, in an America where quite literally, anyone can somehow manage to get their hands on one, regardless of their mental capacity, or existing rap sheets with law enforcement.  If someone has enough murderous intent, they’re more than capable of acquiring an instrument of mass death.

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Jags-Vikings Super Bowl, let’s do it!

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not going to lie, I don’t even pay attention to the NFL anymore.  Not because I have some sort of moral stance against all the guys kneeling or anything, and especially not because I don’t like football, quite the contrary, I just happen to like college ranks more than the NFL.  I really don’t have much of a reason for it, except maybe that I’d rather spend my Sundays doing other things than watching NFL games these days, like catching up on the hundreds of television shows or movies I have ear-marked as wanting to watch, or playing video games, or going out and doing things.

Whatever though, in spite of how ambivalent I may have become towards the NFL, there are days like this one where the NFL captures the imagination of everyone who didn’t see it live but watched the replays of the pivotal moment on a litany of outlets and are proclaiming it the greatest play in the history of the game like fucking idiots.  But the Minnesota Vikings pulled off a last-second touchdown play that allowed them to come from behind and beat the New Orleans Saints and advance to the NFC championship, one step away from the Super Bowl.

I understand why people are acting like it was a miracle, because frankly, professional sports are excruciatingly difficult, and to convert a play like that with five seconds left really does take a tremendous amount of luck.  But the reality is that the corner whiffed on the Vikings wideout* worse than the Huffington Post predicting the 2016 election, resulting in a really easy catch and run to the end zone to cause bedlam in Minneapolis.

*not even going to pretend like I know these guys’ names, much less exert the effort to find out

It wasn’t like a miracle, one-handed fingertip catch over three defenders in the end zone, it wasn’t even a hail mary distance.  It really was as simple as a defender blowing his coverage, and the wide receiver getting an easy catch out of it, and scoring on the play.  The fact that it happened with five seconds to go in the fourth quarter with the Vikings behind a score was incidental.

But it was still cool, because shit like this doesn’t happen on a regular basis, much less during the playoffs.  Usually incompetence doesn’t make the playoffs, but as freaks of physical nature football players are these days, they’re often times dumb as bricks inside the noggin.

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Real-life Difficult People

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently I started watching Difficult People; it came recommended to me when I said that I was a big fan of Parks and Recreation.  The parallels to Parks and Rec were that it’s also single-camera shot, Amy Poehler is an executive producer, and one of the co-stars of the show is Billy Eichner, who played Tom Haverford’s flamboyantly intense sommelier in Parks and Rec. 

However, those things aside, I think the comparisons kind of cease, and so far I have to admit that I’m not quite getting into the show as I hoped I would.  Sure, the show shouldn’t be more of the same Parks and Rec formula by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ll admit the last episode I saw (Italian Piñata) was actually really funny, but what it boils down to is the fact that it’s nowhere near as good as Parks and Rec.

The thing is, the show is based on two assholes who go around acting like vapid dicks, living in a sandbox.  Difficult People doesn’t actually go anywhere, and I just recently realized that I’ve been watching the show kind of out of chronological order, but haven’t really noticed, because every episode is self-contained, and it’s just a different story of how Julie and Billy can be shitty people.  This is a far cry from the Parks and Rec formula that had a continuously forward-moving storyline with characters that grew, developed and actually cared about one another.

However, this isn’t a post about how weak Difficult People is, or how much superior Parks and Rec is over every other show (The Good Place, however, is an excellent show, coincidentally created by Michael Schur, one of the founding fathers of Parks and Rec).  What really inspired this post is the fact that I realized that there’s basically a Julie and Billy in my life right now, and that I’m sure lots of people out there have their own variants of Difficult People in their own, whether they realize it or not.

It just so happens to be coincidental that I’ve been watching this show when I came to this realization, and that the people I have in mind are, like Julie and Billy, a loud-mouthed woman and a loud-mouthed gay guy.  And unfortunately, I work with them, so I see them nearly every single working day.

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Only the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back during the summer, the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves announced they were going to change their name, moving forward.  After sifting through the dank and salt for viable candidates, the final ballot was narrowed down to the following six options:

  • Gwinnett Buttons
  • Gwinnett Big Mouths
  • Gwinnett Gobblers
  • Gwinnett Hush Puppies
  • Gwinnett Lamb Chops
  • Gwinnett Sweet Teas

Obviously, none of these were particularly fantastic options, but I figured Buttons would’ve won easily, since it was the least over-the-top campy name, and that there was the historical element behind it, as Button Gwinnett was whom the entire county was named after as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Regardless, at the county level and those who were remotely interested in the distraction of a dumb story like this, there was much debate, but more pettiness when it came to the topic of renaming the Gwinnett Braves, that really could be summed up with the fact that all available options were pretty shitty.

So naturally, the winner of the contest ended up being the Gwinnett Stripers.

What’s that you say?  It wasn’t an option?  By golly, it wasn’t!  The Braves blindsided the fans yet again, with the bat of no-transparency, and went ahead and made choices without the people that sign their paychecks!

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Turds in the pool

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ever since Rito rolled out the League of Legends update signifying the end of season 7 and into the preseason of season 8, things have been a little bit interesting in my gaming observations.  Among the very numerous things that have been changed up, I would have to say that one of the more notable actions was the removal of the level cap, which for the previous eight years had been level 30.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why Riot decided to do such, but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that once 30, many players go off and create alternate (smurf) accounts, so they can either have multiple accounts to play from with ulterior motives, or if they’re actually really good players, climb the ranking ladder with multiple accounts and/or then try to sell them for actual currency.  Either way, they end up diluting the player pool with multiple accounts, and I feel like by removing the level cap, it incentivizes continuous play on one main account, since there’s no more limit to how much the account can level up to.

However, one of the (I feel is like an) unintended result of removing of the level cap is that there’s a mad rush of players suddenly looking for the quickest way to level their accounts beyond 30, so they can have some bragging rights or try and look better than they actually are, by getting their accounts higher than everyone else.  Effectively, when Riot removed the level cap, level 30 became the new level 1 all over again.

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