Tag: white people

Imagine being so insecure of your masculinity that you need to get a MANLY BAND

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what it says about my browsing habits and the conversations that big brother is listening to, but I got this ad for some company called MANLY BANDS and it’s apparent that they’re in the business of making MANLY rings for the MANLIEST of MEN to wear to physically indicate their marital status.

They appear to be available in names like THE COWBOY, and based on the one photo they have, they appear to have wood as one of the materials in which they’re made, looking like a squashed barrel that Donkey Kong sat on instead of throwing at Mario.  Apparently instead of some pussy jeweler’s ring box, they’re packaged in TACTICAL BOXES, because nothing is MANLIER than presenting shit inside of a tactical box instead of something made of lesser, more pussier material.

I love how their logo is crisscrossed fire axes, a campfire and a tree, to hit that this is what a MANLY BAND is made out of, and of course their choice of font is IMPACT, because this whole thing is just so absurdly ridiculous, it may as well be a meme.

Oh, and I’m definitely not going to ignore the very obvious MANLY BAND customer looking like how he’s got his bride in a chokehold in order to kiss her, because he probably sees her as property after saying ‘I do’ and is wasting no time at imposing his will and possession over her.

And come on, bro can’t even take off his fucking Apple watch for his wedding?  I like the convenience of being able to check the time at any given moment, but even I took my fitness tracker off when I got married.

I remember when I was looking for a wedding band before I got married.  I initially thought I wanted something different than a traditional sterling or gold or white gold band, and I imagined myself getting something like a carbon fiber band or something different, not necessarily to be MANLY, but just for a change of things.

I tried on some carbon fiber rings and things that weren’t so traditional, but frankly they all looked too dark and ridiculous for my taste.  Ultimately, I went with a tantalum band that definitely leaned more traditional, but at the same time was slightly darker than a shiny band, and I like the general indestructible nature of it in order to get a degree of uniqueness that I’m satisfied with.

But never did it once cross my mind that there would be the possibility of giving off the perception of becoming less MANLY if I picked a questionable wedding band.  So going back to the title of this post, imagine being so insecure with your masculinity that you feel the need to acquire a MANLY BAND as a wedding ring.  Maybe the aesthetics are more these bros’ style, but for me, anything with wood is a no-go.  Last thing I’d want from my ring is for it to get beat up like mine sometimes does, and then it starts to rot because that’s what wood tends to do.

Either way, chalk MANLY BANDS as one of the dumber things to have come into existence in recent years.  I think I’d put them up with drinking cups made out of baseball bats, but unlike those, I wouldn’t wager a sacrificial bet in order to get the Braves to win a World Series for a MANLY BAND.

Welp, absolutely no more reason to favor Southwest over anyone else

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

AP: Southwest Airlines ditching bags fly free, eliminating their last real differentiator to competitors

And with the elimination of open seating as of the start of the 2025 season, Southwest Airlines has fully committed to blending into the landscape entirely, leaving them with no more real differentiators from their competition.  Honestly, bags fly free, as small as it seemed in comparison to what they once were as one of the true alternatives in the airline playing field, was still something to consider for airline passengers planning a trip.

Sure, they kind of baked it into their general fares once you did some price shopping against other airlines plus bag fees, but if you played your cards right, Southwest was still a place where you could snag a bargain, if you had the flexibility or willingness to nudge your schedule around.

But with the elimination of bags fly free, it’s apparent that Southwest no longer gives any shits about industry disruption and shaping their brand around being a friendlier alternative to the Deltas, Uniteds and Americans out there that are otherwise crowding the playing field, and prefers to be among the big dogs, raking in profits through a smorgasbord of industry collusion, fare hikes, fees, and general practice of cornering and exasperating consumers into feeling like they have no choice but to shell out in order to accomplish their travel objectives.

It’s funny, because regulation ended in the late 70s, partially so that airline companies could exercise some freedom to be creative, shake up the industry and ultimately strive towards some innovation and likely profit.  But it was done because regulation was choking the industry out with standardized practices, policies, fares and routes, and everyone was basically the same despite operating under different banners.

In the grand spectrum of the airline industry today, regulation might have officially been deregulated in 1978 but make no mistake, regulation really isn’t gone as far as practice goes.  Between all the big dog airlines out there that have a stranglehold on most of the premier routes throughout the country and internationally, they’re all basically the same despite having different names.

They’re all ass-expensive nowadays, have as many taxes and fees as a Ticketmaster transaction, bags don’t fly free and cost an arm, changes at their behest fuck your schedule up, and changes at your behest costs a leg.  They all have shitty customer service, and when the day is over, coordinating airline travel isn’t really that different than coordinating a trip to the movies.  Sometimes we’ll pay the extra and settle on having to deal with a shitty 3-D version of the film solely because the schedule is optimal, and it’s not that different with flying the skies, we’ll go with the airline that fucks us the least and isn’t that terrible for our desired schedules.

In the end, the airline industry really has turned into absolutely nothing more than a game of hubs.  Where smaller airlines squabble and compete over every single customer, the bigger dogs are all trying to gain footholds in regions, because the more regions they can hold higher market share in, the more they’re simply going to win the wars of attrition solely based on routes.

Everyone knows that Atlanta is Delta country, Chicago is where United and American have giant presences, and all of them have smaller hubs across the country.  Southwest seems content to keep their footings in places like Dallas, Baltimore and Phoenix, and instead of trying to keep customers happy or working to be the refreshing alternative to the rest of the market, they’ll probably focus on gaining footing in other markets instead.

Either way, at this point, one change Southwest really should consider is allowing their flights to be searchable on aggregate comparison sites and scrapers like Kayak, Expedia and Travelocity.  I have to imagine it was probably fucking them in the past, voluntarily not being searchable on third-party sites, trying to really push consumers to search directly and save some money, but since they’re no longer trying to compete anymore, they may as well try to bail on this methodology and allow themselves to be searchable on aggregate sites; just like all their competitors do.

The bottom line is that I don’t travel as much as I once did, but I always did like Southwest in that they flew directly from Atlanta to two places I like to be able to get to.  I’m not going to outright blacklist them because that would only hurt myself, but I don’t really have any reason to give them any preferable consideration over any competitors.

And as I’ve said hundreds of times in my life, I miss AirTran, and I still hold a little salt at Southwest for Borg’ing them just to get access to their routes, but then jacking up the fares on said routes to where it’s difficult to consider them more often.

It only took twelve years

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, I wrote a post about how cursive was being phased out of educational standards, and that it was only a matter of time before the ability to read cursive writing would become a viable job, due to the fact that all of the nation’s most critical documents were all written in, cursive.

Welp, twelve years later, and the National Archives are seeking volunteers to decipher the ancient cursive text from documents from the Revolutionary War.  I love their choice of words like “decode” and “decipher” to make it sound like these are ancient historians deciphering hieroglyphics and non-Roman character text like they’re characters from The Mummy or National Treasure, but when you get to the meat of the blurb, it’s more big words to describe a pedestrian objective:

and help make them more accessible to everyone.

In other words, legible to dumbasses who are no longer required to learn cursive writing.

Honestly, there’s no way this is the first real known instance of this occurring, but it’s something I saw that seemingly made it to national news. 

Now the trick is how I can be put into a position to where I can capitalize on this pathetic educational hole and make a little scratch on the side before more older pleebs realize the undervalued skill that really shouldn’t be a skill.

Seriously, everyone should stop volunteering for this shit, and start charging some money for it.  As the image above describes, if you’re good at something, don’t fucking do it for free.  Especially since we live in a country that’s actively at war with itself, with a government as rotten as the bottom layer of a package of strawberries from Kroger.  If they want something from the people, the people should have the wherewithal to realize that they should charge for it.

I suppose it’s now acceptable to put cursive reading and writing on my resume as a viable talent, and I really want to make sure my kids are taught cursive, and want to see if I can get them to utilize in their school work in the future, befuddle their teachers who inevitably didn’t have to learn it themselves, and see if they get reprimanded and called out for using it, so that I can throw in their face that they’re the dumbasses who allowed for such an elementary skill to fall to the wayside because society is stupid and lazy.

But I knew this was going to happen eventually. I fucking called it. 

Catching up on Marvel shows long after the fact

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With the weather being as shitty as it sometimes gets in the peak winter months, I’ve been resorting to getting my cardio in via the treadmill as opposed to going outside to run and walk.  That being said, treadmill time opens the door for me to catch up on watching shows from the seemingly endless queue of titles that are added more frequently than they are crossed off.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve actually managed to cross two titles off of the list, them being Marvel’s season 2 of Loki, and the presumably standalone season of Echo.  In the past, I used to rush Marvel properties to the top of the list and watch them as soon as humanly possible, because the internet and social media are terrible things that have a tendency to spoil things.  But over the last few years, life, time, apathy, the algorithm, and a ridiculous oversaturation of content has shied me away from keeping up with the Marvels, and they’ve just instead sat in the queue to when I had the time, and shits to bring myself to start watching them again.

It’s actually kind of interesting to watch certain shows once a significant passage of time has occurred, because a lot of things can happen in the course of a year or two.  Like watching Loki S2, where Jonathan Majors’ Kang is so very much a major player in not just this show, but at the time, the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it was almost a shame to watch a show filmed at a time when he was still this guy knocking on the door of cinematic stardom, because I think he really is a talented performer, not just as Kang, but I also enjoyed him tremendously in Lovecraft Country, and now in spite of his role in the MCU, is basically for all intents and purposes, cancelled.

Echo, was short and sweet, being just five episodes, but again, when the show dropped, there was no news that the, for lack of a better term, the Daredevil/Kingpin universe was going to be reset, although I suspect that such was probably brewing in the background considering the direction they went with the Kingpin himself.  I did appreciate that Charlie Cox had a part in Echo, naturally doing one of his ridiculous one-take extended fight scenes, and good on Alaqua Cox for having the skill and stamina to keep up with it.  But again, it was another show watched long after its drop date, and a lot of things in the background have changed, and kind of alters the perspective on the show as a whole.

Staying on Echo though, I have to say that of many of the Marvel television shows, I would put Echo up among the top of the rankings when it comes to music selection.  All throughout the MCU television universe, there have been some real banger soundtracks, and Echo’s is right up near the top as far as my auditory preferences are, along with Luke Cage and Punisher.  The song, Burning by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was one that I liked tremendously, and I rarely skipped the opening credits

Here’s the thing though, among the changes that have occurred within Marvel itself, are the changes to the world as a whole that really make watching “older” things like Loki and Echo and presumably any other Marvel property that lets 2-3 months surpass kind of are, and yes unfortunately I am referring to things that are occurring on account of the shitty political wasteland ‘Merica continues to slide down, mainly the unfortunate mass abolishment of DEI policies.

There’s no sugarcoating it; Marvel has been doing a pretty good job of organically adhering to the inclusion of diversity throughout the years.  Loki excels at having a diverse cast, and I was tickled to see Ke Huy Quan show up as a key character in S2, and I love how Data is becoming a commodity in Hollywood in general.  Echo was basically a DEI jackpot, with the titular character Maya Lopez, being of indigenous descent, who also happens to be hearing impaired, and oh yeah has a prosthetic leg.

It was still a great show that definitely highlights indigenous culture, but I can’t help but wonder if shows like this will actually see the light of day in the rapidly devolving ‘Merican ecosystem, and if Disney themselves will fall into the ranks of other notable companies, and eventually scrap their DEI initiatives, and gradually we the viewers start to see less and less diversity in future projects.

All the same, maybe I’m just thinking too much about it, or perhaps the state of the world is permeating into my headspace, no matter how much conscious effort I put into avoiding the news.  Both of these shows were still enjoyable, and at least while they were produced prior to the last election, I can still look forward to Agatha All Along and any other rando series and films that I might’ve missed before I eventually expend the effort to catch the new Captain America flick.

New cars are useless without improving the infrastructure

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ATL Urbanize: MARTA’s train cars of the future unveiled in a ceremony full of people acting impressed who will probably never ride them again

It’s funny, among the things that I try to do on the regular, is that I like to look back and see the posts I made in previous years, and not that long ago, I came across a post I made back in 2022, writing about a proposed train car redesign MARTA had in the works.  I chuckled a little at my own analogy about how it looked like a cross-breed between a Daft Punk helmet and a Mass Effect Cerberus shock trooper, with its prevalent colored light in the front, but mostly allowed myself to have a thought about where the fuck these supposed train cars of tomorrow were, considering the post was from three years ago.

So it wasn’t that distantly past in my brain when I found out that MARTA actually just unveiled the supposed train cars of the future in recent ceremony, filled to the gills with press, bureaucrats and a bunch of people who have never actually used public transportation in their adult lives, all applauding and congratulating mostly themselves at the unveiling of a singular shiny new train car, with supposed promises that they’ll be operational and ready for the pleebs public in July.

Like I opined three years ago, as much as I had my clowning shoes on and I am always ready to get ready to criticize and textually rip MARTA apart for what is usually most likely misspent funds and poor operations, the new cars really aren’t that bad.  The current trains are all dated as fuck, and it’s like they literally transported the Washington DC’s old Metro cars to Atlanta, while they dumped their even older cars into the ocean, so some fresh new train cars are actually a great idea in the grand spectrum of running a transit authority.

From what I have been able to see, the new train cars are like, one gigantic car, with no portioning or separation between them.  I’m sure there’s a good reason for doing such, but at the same time, I’ve seen criticisms about how this will enable train trash like bums, grifters, panhandlers, and other knuckleheads to kind of have more freedom to roam and troll the entire train, instead of being portioned off into a singular car, and give riders a chance at avoiding them.

I used to snidely remark about how I’d donate $100 to a charity of anyone’s choosing if I were ever able to ride MARTA without having to hear someone else’s music, which is to say that such never happened in all the times that I’ve done such, but now that cars will be open and accessible to all riders instead of single cars, I have a feeling that dickhead behavior isn’t really going to change so much as it’s going to evolve, much like a variant of the flu.

Which leads to the very obvious observation that new train cars are nice and all, but if the general infrastructure of MARTA itself doesn’t improve, it doesn’t matter how many shiny new rail cars with interactive screens and fancy lights up front to avoid confusion on what line you’re on is.  If riders don’t feel safe, or have confidence that the trains will work, be on time, and not break down, nothing is going to change from how things are today.

MARTA still has a piss-poor reputation, remains the butt of jokes for the city, and faces an uphill battle as endless as Sisyphus.  Keith Parker was the last guy that managed to actually improve things, but it was clear he was pushed to his patience’s limit before he cut and run, and the guy that followed him was drained by MARTA so badly that he killed himself.

I don’t pay attention to the minutiae of MARTA like I used to in the past, but I’m not sure new train cars are going to really solve much if the perception and infrastructure of the authority hasn’t improved at all.  New cars are one thing, but the fact that MARTA itself hasn’t added any real new stops, showed any expansion whatsoever, and is still going back and forth on the same mostly useless cross-shaped map, nothing has really changed.

But hey, at least the trains are going to look cool.  I wonder just how much pocket lining every single train is going to make a bunch of shadow investors?  All I know is that if I ever find out, I’m sure there’ll be a brog post about it.

Seems appropriate that Zombie Deer have made their way to Georgia

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Chronic Wasting Disease, aka the zombie deer disease has started showing up in Georgia

A friend of mine already popped all the actual science behind a lot of this, but imagine how much my imagination exploded upon hearing the words “zombie deer” and “in Georgia.”  The fact that I’m posting about it regardless of the fact that I’ve heard the science that mostly ruins my fantasy that this is the start of the zombie apocalypse goes to show that much like actual zombies, there is life in this topic, even after it it’s dead.

Sure, it is has a 100% kill rate among deer that get infected, which sucks for the deer, and unsurprising, there have been many cases of humans who have already eaten CWD-infected venison.  Yes, there have been deaths in some cases, but as long as the dumbasses aren’t eating The Big Texan slabs of it, it seems to mostly just result in horrific intestinal issues that don’t always kill humans.

Originally, I had all these grand ideas about how Georgia and inevitably the rest of the world were going to be fucked, because relying on the subsect of hunters that fall into categories of being dumb, uneducated, ignorant, some of all of the above if not completely all of the above, to not eat infected venison, allow the disease to mutate and become zootic, leading to the zombie plague for humanity, seemed kind of inevitable.

And how the thought of the zombie apocalypse beginning still seemed preferable to the orange-colored America we were going to be embarking on for the next four years, and I likened it to my version of the choosing the bear meme that women had with a little while ago.

At least in a zombie apocalypse, sure the rate of mortality would probably drop tremendously for humanity as a species, but at least if any zombies threatened me or my family, the opportunity to legally bludgeon and beat the ever-living fuck out of something would be unlocked, and completely in the name of self-defense.  A life-long fantasy of killing zombies seems like a fair trade off, in exchange for getting away from lily-orange America, at least it does in my opinion.

But no, like I said, a friend of mine already burst my bubble by dropping a lot of actual factual science as far as CWD goes which is funny that it’s such an acronym, considering it’s so very close to the popular The Walking Dead TWD acronym.  And most everyone knows that Georgia is basically the zombie capital of America, considering it’s history for being the backdrop for TWD, Zombieland, and all sorts of zombie film and television at this point.  So it seems very appropriate for zombie deer to finally have made their arrival in Georgia, and it’s really a surprise in itself that it didn’t start here in the first place.

Honestly, it would’ve been more surprising had it been unanimous

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shocker: Ichiro voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but denied unanimous induction by one anonymous vote; reactions are as expected

Like the subject says, it would’ve been more surprising if Ichiro did get the vaunted unanimous decision and make it into the Hall of Fame with the most noteworthy of honors.  But baseball has a problem in their legacy department, and they don’t seem to be in any rush at all to try and alleviate it.  So unsurprising to just about any baseball fan who knows how the voting process works, Ichiro does make the Hall of Fame, as predicted, but, as many have before him, failed to get 100% unanimity, and the part of the internet that cares about this, goes ballistic.

The funny thing is that I predicted that this was probably going to happen back in 2020, when I went on an identical diatribe about how fucked up it was that a single voter denied Derek Jeter the unanimous entry.  I could just have easily just sticky’d and reposted that old post, copy/pasted the whole thing and just replaced “Derek Jeter” with “Ichiro” and it would’ve translated itself fairly seamlessly, but I’m an old man who clearly likes to talk about the same shit over and over again, and am going through the futile exercise of writing about it again.

So here we are again, where some anonymous voter is getting off at knowing that they alone have sparked the internet hate machine, and have thousands of keyboard warriors who want their head on a spike.  Naturally, they’re content with the chaos that they caused and will have absolutely no intention of revealing themselves, because that would assume a modicum of accountability they want to take, and people these days dodge accountability like they’re agents from The Matrix dodging bullets.

People calling for credentials to be revoked, voting rules to be changed, more accountability and transparency; all logical and pragmatic ideas, but none of them are going to occur.  I surmise the only way a vote is actually revoked is when the presumably old, white, guy croaks and he’s physically unable to return a ballot for multiple years and the old white guys at the BBWAA offices start getting return to sender and get the message that the voter might have died.

Lots of hypothetical guesses that it’s the same guy who didn’t vote for Jeter, and frankly, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to put them in the same basket as the guys who didn’t vote for Cal Ripken, Jr., Tony Gwynn, Ken Griffey, Jr., Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson, among other legends of the game where their inductions probably should have been unanimous.

Personally, I’ve been spouting off on random comment threads and accusing Bill Ballou out of Boston, because he’s the dude who went on an arrogant diatribe back in 2019 about how he didn’t vote for Mariano Rivera, but just didn’t turn in his ballot, thus still allowing him to get the only unanimous vote in HOF history, but someone somewhere rebutted to me that his vote this year was made public, and he did actually vote for Ichiro.  Other names of baseball writers I’ve never heard of have been thrown out there, but there are many, and none of them are taking the bait to defend themselves, and actually helping the cause of identifying the lone tryhard, so it’s really all futile all the same.

Here’s the thing too – I don’t even really like Ichiro, as a person.  In the two World Baseball Classics he participated in, he got a little too uppity nationalistic and made disparaging remarks about Korea, despite Korea holding their own against his Japanese squad, and although the rest of the world’s baseball fandom still idolizes him, I still see him as a bit of an asshole from that angle.  But as a baseball player, there really were few better and consistent and talented as he was, and I respect all of his actual baseball accolades.

Of course he deserved to get in unanimously.  For years, people have been coming up with reasons why he shouldn’t get in, at all or first ballot, and throughout his tenure in MLB, he’s knocked them all down.  People loved to discount the 2,000+ hits he had in Japan, and said it would be cheating for him to add that to his hit total to surpass 3,000, so he just went ahead and notched 3,000+ hits in MLB alone.  Along the way, he surpassed Pete Rose as the all-time leader in cumulative hits.  Won numerous batting titles, gold gloves, and AL Rookie of the Year and MVP at the same time.  Frankly, the only thing that eluded him was a World Series, but frankly that could happen to anyone who’s majority was spent in Seattle.

But unsurprisingly, he was denied.  Another legend, denied the ultimate honor, by a spineless, anonymous, most likely white guy, determined to upstage the whole idea of HOF voting in order to put themselves over.  And the BBWAA as a whole doesn’t seem to care, so it all but assures that this is going to happen continuously in the future.

Which means in 2027 when Albert Pujols shows up on the ballot, he basically already has a 0% chance of being unanimous.  Forget about his multiple World Series rings with the Cardinals, the 700+ home runs, all the MVPs and other hardware.  Forget about his charity, philanthropy and squeaky-clean image that made him look like a Dominican Mr. Clean.  A voter somewhere is going to see 2027 as an opportunity to become the most wanted man on the internet with a 100% success rate of getting away with it, and completely capitalize on it.

The funny thing is that unlike Jeter, Ichiro probably does care that he didn’t get unanimous.  During the press conference, Ichiro basically started off talking about the one vote he didn’t get, inviting the mystery voter out for a drink to have a talk.  American audiences guffawed about that one, but let’s read between the lines here, Ichiro’s Japanese honor code and general psychotic dedication to baseball says that he probably considers his entire baseball career a failure because of this one guy.  And as I predicted a long time ago, I still think the man is going to fucking kill someone, and this mystery voter has probably just climbed the list of people whom might be that someone.