Tag: television

This story tickles me in a way that only other parents would get

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of us, one of us: extreme tidy-er Marie Kondo admits to giving up on extreme tidiness and that her house is messy

This is what we would call a pivot, in the working world.  I didn’t realize that Marie Kondo was two years younger than me, and it probably would’ve been a real fucking chore to maintain the air of minimalist perfection for the rest of her life in order to maintain her brand, not like she really needs it anymore considering her book has sold over 40 million copies and her Netflix show had already been a big hit.

Coming out to the public to explain that she’s mostly given up on being tidy, and that her own home was messy, probably the smartest thing to do.  Better to disclose the intel on her own terms instead of having someone find it out, disclose it on the internet, and have the wrath of the internet be all over her calling her a fraud and a hypocrite that tells other people what to do with all their shit but doesn’t know how to handle her own.

But what this really boils down to is the fact that the reason why the Queen of Clean has become the Herald of Hoarding just like that, is the same reason why millions of people like me struggle to maintain our own capabilities of tidiness as much as we’d like to: kids.

Her book went gangbusters in 2011, but then she got married in 2012.  Presumably it wasn’t long before did kids come into the equation, so it’s actually very impressive to me that she had the wherewithal to even entertain producing her Netflix series that dropped in 2019, which either means she was an absent parent or her husband filled in admirably, perhaps both.

But as is often the case, once the number of kids begins to outnumber the adults in a family unit, that is where the shit begins to hit the fan.  And this is coming from someone who’s family is currently at a 1:1 ratio, and I still feel like I’m losing control all the time.  I couldn’t imagine bringing another into the home, and mythical wife and I take measures to make sure that such will become an impossibility.

And in Kondo’s case, third child enters the fray, and suddenly she’s no longer able to keep up with being KonMari, professionally, or in her own personal life.  I think it’s hilarious that she didn’t just go from “no longer being tidy,” to being “my house is messy” because frankly that’s the kind of transition that my household went through when kids started entering the equation.

The point of all this is that kids quite literally, break anyone.  If they can break a wealthy multi-media success like Marie Kondo, they’ll have no problem at all busting up the lives of all the rest of us plebes who decide to reproduce and repopulate, and the more non-parents can comprehend just how difficult it is, the better chance of understanding and empathy can emerge.

Of course David Chang thinks he’s too good for Costco’s rotisserie chicken

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not surprising, considering he’s an arrogant star-fucker: David Chang declares Costco’s signature $4.99 rotisserie chicken as “inedible”

The last time I brought up David Chang, I stated that I have a love-hate opinion of the guy, concluding that I was like 40-60 in favor of not cool.  But after hearing him shit on Costco’s rotisserie chickens, I think the needle pegs to 0-100.  The second season of Ugly Delicious wasn’t nearly as good as the first, and it’s pretty apparent that he’s so drunk on his own bullshit  and swept up in his own celebrity that he’s incapable of remembering where he probably came from.

Because I would wager money that in his lifetime, he’s consumed a number of Costco rotisserie chickens.  He grew up in the same area where I grew up in Northern Virginia, and regardless of geography, ALL Koreans love going to Costco, because of the savings available there, no matter how rich or poor they are.  And when it comes to getting bargains, pretty much few things on the planet are on the same level as Costco’s rotisserie chickens.

In fact, I bet his own parents in NOVA still go to Costco on the regular, pulling up in their probably Lexus, and there’s even a good chance that they themselves are still buying rotisserie chickens.  Maybe not necessarily to eat straight out of the package, but to shred up and use in a variety of other Korean dishes, that Chang alleges that still learns things from his mom.

But as for Chang himself, it’s clear that he thinks he’s too good for Costco chicken, and that the perma-$4.99 birds are way beneath him.  After spending the last few years gallivanting around the world and eating foreign foods on Netflix’s dime, and kissing the asses of Hollywood celebrities who all always think they’re some global foodies, he’s completely lost touch with the rest of the world that isn’t wealthy, and has jobs that isn’t opening overrated shit restaurants with weeby names despite being Korean, and might actually see Costco chickens as more than just an economic convenience.

Not everyone has the choice to pick Costco over Sprouts Alhambra, because Costco’s chicken is just too economically friendly that they can’t not buy them, even if the company has disclosed they lose money on every bird they sell because they don’t want to lose the customer faith.  To some, Costco chicken is convenient to process into other recipes, and to those who are workout buffs, the chickens are the absolute biggest bang for the buck as far as protein consumption is concerned.

But all this shit is lost on a celebrity fuck-boi like David Chang has become.  Yeah I’m sure he’s manufacturing hot takes like this in order to draw attention to his likely shitty podcast that he’ll probably abandon within six months because nobody is capable of playing the long game, but I don’t think it’s unrealistic to see that he’s gotten a little too big to be able to understand just why Costco rotisserie chickens are so popular.

Perhaps he should stick to trying to rip off Chick Fil-A sandwiches and falling short, or making bougie gourmet mac and cheese that still falls short to Kraft from his own wife.

Observations of doing online food delivery

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I came to the conclusion that in spite of the fact that I make more money than I’ve ever made in my career, I basically still have no money when it comes to any sort of leisure or just wanting to treat yo-self on rare instances.  To no surprise, it’s all going towards my children or expenses related to my children, and this is one of those instances where I think about how much simpler life can be for those without kids, not to say I have any regrets at all for having them they’re perfect and I love them until the end of existence.

But I don’t really do well when it comes to financial anxiety, and a lot of my general well-being is often tied to how comfortable I feel about paying bills while staying out of debt, and over the last few months, as much as I loathe and avoid it at all costs, I’ve had to carry partial balances over with my credit cards, simply because my outgoing money was surpassing incoming money, no matter how much I try to avoid it.

In the prior two years, I made a pretty penny on doing online surveys for nickels and dimes, enough to make people take notice in like the ten new wrestling blet replicas I was able to get with all of them, but that well has kind of dried up in the sense that the circumstances in which I was able to do them aren’t really applicable anymore, because my kids command a lot of attention, and I can’t absent mindedly bullshit my way through multiple surveys a day like I used to.

Needless to say, I had this revelation while I was in the car one day, that my household now has a third car that’s kind of dormant, and how it would be an ideal ride if I were to get into online food delivery.  It’s small, gets great mileage and is pretty fun and agile to drive, and it would be getting some use, instead of just sitting around deteriorating in dormancy.  Plus, the take home from doing online food delivery would be exponentially larger than doing online surveys, and it was something that I could do when the girls were down for the night.

And so I signed up for both DoorDash and UberEats, and over the last 6-7 weeks, I’ve embarked on moonlighting as a delivery driver.  Suffice to say, I’ve learned a lot in that span, but overall I can’t say that it’s been that negative of an experience as far as wanting to make some side cash for only as much effort as driving around picking up and dropping off bags of food takes.

It’s also been giving me a lot of perspective of being on the other side of the transaction, and naturally a remark like that isn’t said if it wasn’t to commentate on the sheer lack of respect and consideration customers have for their drivers.  Which is all a more eloquent way of saying that the vast majority of customers are a bunch of cheap motherfuckers who by all right shouldn’t deserve to eat if they’re unwilling to pay the people that bring their food to them.

For every generous tip I get from a customer who seems to recognize that I beat the estimated time, took into consideration the swing of their doors when placing their shit so they didn’t hit it, or other little things I do to make sure everything is right, I will have probably like 6-7 cheap motherfuckers who tip the bare minimum it takes for their order to not get outright rejected by all other drivers.  Like in 98%* of instances, I won’t even entertain a request where my take away is $2.75 or less because there’s a 100% chance that $0.00 is a tip and you’ll just be getting the base fare, and these are the shitheads that truly don’t deserve to eat if they’re not willing to pay for any labor.

*why not 100%?  Because sometimes UberEats will do these quests that give you bonus money for completion of trips, regardless of their amount, so if I’m teetering on a quest completion, I’ll take a shit fare if it means getting a bonus afterward

But the majority of tips that I accrue are somewhere in the $2-3 range, and these are orders that looking at the things they’re ordering, are usually well over $20-30, meaning on average, these are barely 10% tips.

The point is, it’s a good thing that I’m doing this as a side hustle and not relying on this to be my primary income, because I think I would go insane by how much passive abuse I’m getting from cheap-ass customers who use the veil of anonymity to justify being cheap assholes to have their shit delivered to their doors.

Another thing I’ve observed is that initially, I thought doing this, I’d be exposed to a lot of new restaurants where I could passively learn about through delivering their stuff.  I mean I’ve found a few places that I wasn’t really aware of, but when it really comes down to it, I’d have to say the majority of the drops that I’m doing are usually delivering someone their fast food, or Chinese food, or chain-establishment pizza, which really befuddles me, because I’m usually passing a number of Chinese or pizza joints on the way to these delivery spots, so I have no idea how these algorithms are when it comes to people and their choice of food.

I’ve learned that chain joints like McDonald’s, Popeyes and other massive chains don’t really give two shits about service time and having an order ready for pickup, because no amount of negative feedback to them is going to really improve their operations, so when I’m able to be picky about things, I try to tell myself to avoid them, because the bane of my existence is waiting for these businesses to prepare orders, and not a single night has gone by where there hasn’t been one pickup that hasn’t made me wait because I’m fast and they’re slow, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re the ones who cost me the chances at getting better tips on account of being extra early.

Favorite words to see: Leave at door
Least favorite words to see: Meet at door
You guys are assholes: Customer PIN required

Overall, the experience hasn’t been that bad.  I’m making some side cash in about 60-90 minutes on the nights I decide to go out, and I can usually do like 2-3 drops whenever I do go out.  It’s a decent way to clear my head and do something mindless, but at least make money in the process, and with these funds, I’ll hopefully be able to supplement my income for the ever-mounting expenditures that seem to be creeping into my life, or maybe even sack some of it away for some me-shit like a new raptop or inevitably, moar wrestling blets.

And to get in front of an inevitable question: yes, I have taken a French fry from a customer’s order before.  They didn’t tip, Chick fil-A didn’t seal the bag, I was hungry, and I didn’t know how to cancel orders yet, so in order to feel like I was getting any sort of retribution to an asshole, I totally took a French fry out of their order.  So the picture of Johnny Lawrence from Cobra Kai isn’t entirely just coincidental.

Letterkenny S11: what was the point of this?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I recently wrapped up watching Letterkenny season 11, and I was left with this feeling of, what was the point of this season?  As quirky and Canadian redneck Seinfeld-y the show can be, most of the later seasons at least had some kind of storyline that the plot gravitated back towards at the end of every few episodes; Wayne and Tanis, Wayne and Marie Fred, Katy and Dierks, the hockey season; to me, the charm of the show was that when it actually narrowed its focus to some centralized storylines, the quality became untouchably good.

Sure, most everyone loves the show for its cold opens, the long-game jokes that the show commits to using even after multiple seasons, and the endless array of one-liners.  But after season nine (the hockey season), the show has seemingly plateaued, and it’s like Jared Keeso and the rest of the showrunners have no clue on what to do next, and until they do, they’re just kind of putting out a bunch of stop-gap one-off episodes with no centralized plot, but also no sense of heart and soul that some of the preceding seasons managed to capture.

Everyone knows that S10’s objective was to set up the Shoresy spin-off show, to which I think was a little bit (read: a lot) of a flex by Keeso to make up a fluffy season of Letterkenny to launch a show that basically lets him play hockey on a network’s dime, and the quality of the season was really mediocre.  I likened it to Ocean’s Twelve, which was an excuse for George Clooney and gang to have a working Italian vacation, while making a turd of a film, but at least there was still an objective for S10 to accomplish.

And in all fairness, I rather liked Shoresy a lot, because they established a central storyline, and no matter what hijinks or parade of one-liners the characters got into the rest of the season, it always gravitated back towards it.  It seemed apparent that a little bit more heart and soul went into Shoresy than it did Letterkenny, and if there’s one thing I’ve always said about any business, which television shows are, it’s don’t stray too far from what brought you to the dance.

But getting back to S11 of Letterkenny, not only was it short at just six episodes, I have no idea what the whole point of this season was.  I couldn’t really tell if there were even any seeds for a potential plot to have in the future, and the whole season felt more like it was making episodes for all of the usual suspects to get a paycheck, as well as basically being a sounding box for Keeso’s pet peeves.

They kind of had one small plot revolving around a degen trying to turn over a new leaf, but it’s resolved in the sixth episode, and if that really was the only real story of the season, much like Dune, you only needed to read/watch the last 30 pages/minutes, and that was the whole story right there.

Otherwise, it was just a checklist for everyone to make an appearance; Glenn got a good bit of time to shine with his dialogue, Jonesy who looked like he got jacked in S10, looks like he lost his gains and Riley found them, and Bonnie McMurray’s actress looks like she’s had a little too much work done to herself and doesn’t look particularly healthy.  Wished there was more Tanis and less of the Dycks, but when you only produce six episodes and call it a season, what can you do about having enough screen time to breathe?

I’m not mad, just disappointed.  I really loved the journey of watching the show from seasons 1-9, but the last two have just been really below standard, and I hope they get their shit together for a future season, otherwise this is just a classic case of a show getting big, but then running out of ammo to keep up the good fight.

Stetson Bennett went to Grambling State??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because that golden G logo next to his name is Grambling State University’s logo, an HBCU in Louisiana.  Pretty big of Stetson Bennett IV to not see color, in spite of having the whitest name on the face of the planet.

Or more likely, pretty bad on ESPN to not consider the copyright infringement and flagrant disrespect to an HBCU by gold-washing the team logos just because it was the national championship.  No shock there that ESPN doesn’t notice stepping on a black school.

But all jokes aside, holy mary mother of god, was that an ass-whoopin’.  65-7 is basically a Madden score when you turn the difficulty down to very easy, turn off injuries and fatigue, and truck the shit out of the AI, whose lone TD comes on a successful Hail Mary because the game’s rubberband mechanics basically make it impossible for someone to get shutout.

In spite of the chips on the shoulders, the media disrespect and all other detractors that should have for all intents and purposes fired them up to put up something of a fight, TCU put up what surely has to be one of the most embarrassing and worst national championship game performances in history. [2011 LSU and 1991 Miami were both shutout, and 2000 FSU scored just 2 points lol safety]  Undoubtedly, it was the biggest blowout in natty history, and outside of Georgia, probably one of the most boring national championship games ever.

Seriously, seven points?  In a natty?  It’s flabbergasting just how wrong everything was about TCU, and hopefully we never see TCU anywhere near the playoff again, much less playing for another national championship.  Frankly, I think it’s time we stop using the phrase Power Five when it comes to talking about conferences, because the Big-12, or the Pac-12 haven’t proven shit when it comes to football, considering notwithstanding that fluky first 2014, every single natty has been won by an SEC school or Clemson.

I mean I know I’m coming off as a mega SEC blowhard, but the numbers are the numbers.  All of my zero readers know that I’m really an ACC blowhard, regardless of how much Virginia Tech pretends to be a football school. Any single SEC school would have put up a better fight against Georgia than TCU did, and so often times is the case, after an SEC school routs a non-SEC school for a natty, there’s always some player or coach that makes the backhanded remark about how conference games are more competitive.

For context, unranked Florida and Missouri put up 20 and 22 points against Georgia earlier in the year.  Georgia Tech put up 14 points.  Even Kent State hung 22 on Georgia and they’re not even a Power-Five Three program.

I mean everyone has bad games, but this was the national championship.  This is the game where nobody should have any bad games, this is the game where everyone has been duking it out for the last six months and where real contenders should be showing why they’re contenders.  It’s not even that I’m happy that as a Georgia resident, Grambling State Georgia won another natty, I’m just disappointed that TCU shit the bed so embarrassingly bad.  Of course I was hoping Georgia would beat them, but when they basically didn’t even try, it’s tantamount to as being as meaningful as a win as beating a bunch of blind paraplegics in any sort of physical contest.

Whatever though, the only reason this post even came to fruition was the hilarious observation that I’m sure that only I noticed, that Stetson Bennett IV was shown on screen as playing for Grambling State.  Being the logo master that I am that collated all the logos and team colors for NCAA.com, only a snob like me would have.

Netflix’s Resident Evil was terrible and I don’t know why I watched all of it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

  1. Something that was surprisingly difficult to do for this post was finding a good image to use with it. Despite the fact that the show is about how the world is mostly overrun by zombies, they sure didn’t show a whole lot of zombies, and they ones that they did show really weren’t particularly impressive and for a Netflix production they sure weren’t much better than a low-budget HK zombie film.  The main cast were so often away from zombies or any of the traditional Resident Evil baddies, that a single solitary Cerberus dog image, wins by default.
  2. A long time ago, when I was in Las Vegas in my brother, we for some reason went to the ESPN Zone in New York, New York for dinner, instead of the numerous alternate places to go eat, like Ellis Island. I think there was a WWE pay-per-view on that night, and we thought that they would be showing it, which is what caused us to go in the first place.  There was no PPV and worse off we phoned it in and stayed for dinner, and it was so mediocrely unimpressive, it’s basically become a go-to analogy for us to describe anything at all that is as unimpressive, even to this day.

Speaking of my brother, it was while I was down in Texas visiting him, that we watched the first episode of Netflix’s Resident Evil rendition.  I remember when it was first announced, there was a lot of hullaballoo about how the show had the audacity to cast a black guy as Albert Wesker, and I theorized on whether who cared more about it between black people and white guilters.

But in spite of the general clunkers the Resident Evil franchise has had as far as live-action adaptations, Netflix still has a good track record of putting out hits, and I tend to favor television format over film, so that stories can breathe and have better pace, so I was optimistic that RE:Netflix couldn’t really be that bad.

Welp, I was fucking wrong.  I will admit that freely.  It was without question one of the worst things I’ve watched in recent memory, and I have nothing but regret in how much time I sunk into watching it, when I could’ve watched absolutely anything else in the seemingly endless queue of shit that I want to watch.  Mythical wife and my au pair, as well as everyone else I’ve ever brought up the series with all asked why the fuck I was continuing to watch it despite my complaining of how bad it was, and it really boils down to the fact that I’m a fan of the franchise and I was always holding on to hope that things would get better as the season progressed.

But it just didn’t.  It never even got any better as it went on.  It wasn’t like The Witcher S1, which started off slow as fuck but then started getting really interesting up until the end of the season.  It wasn’t like Moon Knight, which I thought also sucked, but did have a few moments here and there where I realized that I sort of cared of what was going on.  It just fucking sucked from start to finish.

None of the characters are really likeable.  Kid Jade and Billie are naïve obnoxious teens versus the world, and their adult counterparts aren’t much better.  As much as I was willing to give black Wesker a chance, since I didn’t think Lance Reddick was a bad actor, he clearly played down to his competition, and up until one of the plot twists, he was rigid, robotic and as putrid as the rest of the show.

Jade Wesker is about the stupidest character in television since like, Andrea from The Walking Dead in the sense that she just can’t stop fucking shit up, no matter how good intentioned she might be, there’s always some very critical and tragic collateral damage in the process.  There’s literally an episode where I’m resorting to yelling at the television to get the fuck out of here with this bullshit, because she’s written so recklessly stupid, that it’s just my natural instinct as a viewer with a brain to be that flabbergasted that someone be portrayed to being that goddamn stupid.

Aside from being about Albert Wesker and his kids, the show makes a few other references to core Resident Evil IP by having lickers, showed a Tyrant, a character named Barry, mentions of the Arklay mountains, and name dropping an actual RE character late in the season, but none of it really helps, nor does it really make you feel like you’re in the world of Resident Evil.  In fact, Netflix could really do Capcom a huge favor replace the names Wesker and Umbrella which are the two main things that anchor it to the RE franchise, and just call this show by a new name and chalk it up as a clunker, because the franchise already has a bad enough history of nobody seemingly being capable of turning such a successful video game franchise into a palatable live action series.

The funniest part of this series is that they clearly were banking on there being a second season, based on all the loose ends, unanswered questions, and plot ropes they set up at the end of the season.  They didn’t even really answer the question of how the world got to where it was in the present, although it doesn’t take a genius to make an easy assumption.  And the news of the show’s cancellation was something that I already knew going into it, which added to the amusement of how the show presented itself as something that was assuming was going to go beyond a first season.

All the same though, Netflix’s Resident Evil was basically like the ESPN Zone of television watching for me.  Completely mediocre and regrettable to have invested my precious time into, and I wish I had spent that time on so many other possible options instead.  It makes me sad that one of my favorite video game franchises just can’t ever get it right with a live-action adaptation, and at this point, I just want Hollywood to just stop trying, because they’re not doing the franchise any favors.

  1. One of the episodes I watched was on Plex, so I could watch it on a device that didn’t have Netflix. The version of the episode had audio narration for the visual impaired, and I couldn’t turn it off; but the funny thing?  It actually helped the viewing experience, because it filled in the gaps of character names that the show doesn’t really put much effort into trying to educate viewers on, and it really helped pinpoint the endless back-and-forth time skips between the past and the present.
  2. Netflix’s 1899 wasn’t a bad show. It was pretty intriguing up until the weird Matrix-like ending.  Resident Evil, however stunk from start to finish.  What do both have in common?  They’re both cancelled!

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

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