Tag: ohatlanta

No, it wasn’t

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

By the graciousness of my nanny, whom I excused from being on time to check at a QT for me, was she able to procure a reprint of the November 3rd commemorative Braves World Series victory edition.  This, was the highlight of my day.

So, I’m happy that I got the one thing that I had really wanted to commemorate the joyous occasion of the Braves reaching the top of the mountain and getting to be World Series champions, a sight and notion that is still hard to digest two days later, but I’m still peeved at just how hard it was to get a small piece of history to remember it by.

I’m pretty sure there’s something in the Constitution that says something along the lines of that news shouldn’t not be available to those who seek it, and it’s a stretch, but the AJC, whether it was deliberate or stupidity, suppressing production of the one and only obviously high-demand edition of their shitty paper, I would interpret as being fucking unconstitutional. 

As relieved as I am to have my own edition, predictably, the well-publicized high demand for these editions has created the dreaded and insufferable secondary market for them, and I’ve seen them on Facebook Marketplace going for at least $10 a pop, and mythical wife, after hearing me bitch and moan about it the night prior, spied some on eBay, going for around $27 a pop.

I’m not going to be a hypocrite about it, because I’ve definitely purchased extras of things before, with the intent of trying to flip them.  But whenever I’ve done that, that makes me an asshole, and what people are doing with these fucking AJCs, are making them assholes too.  I’m just glad that I didn’t have to pay a second-hand price for this, although I would have done so in order to get one.

The irony is that, it’s not even that good of a commemorative edition.  The AJC’s aesthetics and design has always been sixth-rate as far as major market newspapers go, and this commemorative edition doesn’t do the Braves justice.

The newspaper industry took a lot of flack over the last few decades over many publications taking cost-cutting measures and eliminating photographers, and instead tasking reporters to take pictures on iPhones.  I don’t know whether or not the AJC was one of those publications, but based on the shitty photo quality of my collector’s edition, I’m inclined to believe they are.

The photos are out of focus and have been enlarged way past the original resolution, and whatever staffers they have pretending to be graphic artists apply a bunch of high-pass filters to try and sharpen them, but instead make them look all posterized and pixelated.  I’d almost be embarrassed to actually display it after I frame it, but it will eventually become artwork for lack of a better term.

Anyway, I’m just glad I got my copy regardless of all the bullshit and hoops that had to be done in order for it to happen.  I just wish what seemed like a simple thing didn’t have to become such a joy-suppressing ordeal.

Fuck the AJC.

Fuck you, AJC

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The only thing I wanted to commemorate the Braves’ World Series victory was a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with some sort of front page cover of the Braves’ victory.  Unsurprising, so does just about every single fucking Braves fan in the Metro Atlanta area, or just people who want a slice of history.

But I guess it’s safe to say that misery loves company and that I am most definitely kept company, given the fact that the AJC printed a paltry 30,000 copies of a commemorative November 3rd edition.  Also unsurprising is that there are thousands of disappointed and upset fans who were unable to get one because there were only 30,000 copies of a fucking newspaper to a metropolitan area that has a population of nearly six million fucking people to which obviously not all of them are going to be Braves fans, but a whole fucking lot more than 30,000 are sure to be.

30,000 copies.  Only distributed at Krogers, Publixes, RaceTracs and QTs.  That probably means each location got like, 20 copies, to which they were obviously all sold out instantaneously by those who were lucky enough to be at the right fucking places at the right fucking time.  And me being handcuffed to a baby for 17 hours of every single day, I can’t even have the chance to even try to get one of these fucking surprisingly Jesus-rare newspaper editions.

Fuck you, AJC.  You’re not Nintendo withholding Switches.  You’re not Sony, artificially suppressing Piss5s.  You’re a fucking regional rag that somehow fucked up getting Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, by pulling this kind of bullshit stunt.  You could have printed 200,000 copies of this fucking paper, and they’d have almost all sold for $3 a pop, netting an absurd amount of revenue for a piece of shit publication that nobody would give two shits about on any other given day, but it just so happened to luck into the regional baseball lottery with the Braves winning a World Series.

Sure, they’re going to reprint a generous 70,000 more copies of it, but the cat is out of the bag now, and people now know the hot ticket these things are, and how many people want them.  And when that happens, if it already hasn’t, we’re going to have motherfuckers buying up multiples to try and flip them for profit, because the world is fucked up, everyone sucks, and I fucking hate everything right now.

I only had one goal, and it was a colossal failure and not for lack of trying.  In spite of my limited opportunities to leave the house, I still tried, failed, because the Publixes and Krogers I tried probably had like five copies.  Sure, there might be maybe 10 copies at each tomorrow, but I’m in the same boat of not going to have any chance to go check, and I probably won’t get them, and I’ll have to settle for the bullshit Friday edition or the Sunday reprint, that I’ll still get with hate and grudge in my soul.

The whole point of this was to get the paper on the fucking day after the World Series ended, and thanks to the AJC being a bunch of fucking fuck faces, dreams of traditionalists and Braves fans like me are all met with the same bullshit fate.

Fuck you, AJC.  I hate you more than COVID-19 right now, and I kind of hope that the Braves never win the World Series again, so that you’ll never have another opportunity to fuck up the golden ticket again.  Better yet, I retract my hopes that the Braves never win again, I hope they do win again, but when they do, the AJC is out of business and replaced by some publication that doesn’t fucking amount to toilet paper for the homeless.

Honestly, I never thought I’d see this in my life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So many thoughts and emotions going through my head right now.  Will try to sort them out and compose more coherent thoughts later, when I’m not so tired and on the verge of ugly-crying happy.

But how can you not love baseball, where a team that had no business being in the playoffs ends up winning the whole goddamn thing?

Doesn’t matter.  Can’t believe I’m actually typing up this as fact:

World Series Champions, Atlanta Braves.

🥲

lol Alpharetta white people

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SMH: racists sue city of Alpharetta because they can’t display the Confederate battle flag at a Veterans Day parade, get shot down in court; however, due to the attention, the city opts to cancel the parade outright

My reaction to reading this story was the following line, said in the mocking southern white supremacist impression I’ve found myself doing an awful lot more than I used to since 2016: 

if I cain’t be racist at the parade, I don’t want there to be a parade at all.

That’s kind of the takeaway of this whole story.  Supposedly, the parade still happened, whether or not it was sanctioned by the city in the first place, I don’t have the care to dig and find out, but supposedly the Sons of Confederate Veterans did not participate or fly any Confederate battle flags during it.

Either way, Alpharetta is a super white suburb north of Atlanta, and I’m actually more surprised that the courts ruled in favor of outlawing the Confederate battle flag, given their demographics.  But Alpharetta is also pretty flush with new money which tends to lean towards the left, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned throughout history, money speaks louder than racism and political correctness, and by product of it, sometimes the right calls are occasionally made.

Oh, Atlanta #655

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Atlanta rapper Young Thug is gifted 100 acres of land, decides to build a city on it

First off, I have to give credit where credit is due: the first time I ever heard of Young Thug, my first thoughts were one, relieved that he actually spelled it “Young” and not “Yung” and possibly be mistaken as someone with some Asian heritage in them.  And two, that there was no way Young Thug would be anything more than a flash in the pan Atlanta rapper who is white hot for two seconds, but is completely gone and forgotten in a month, and would soon be at the gas station at the corner of Boulevard and Memorial, trying to sell people his CD.

But here we are, five years past the first time I ever brogged about this guy, and he’s still making the news, even if it it’s for shit that sound stupider than billionaires trying to race to see who can get into outer space first.

I don’t particularly think ol’ Thug realizes how little land 100 acres is in the grand spectrum of things, when it comes to trying to start up a city, especially when from the looks of things, maybe 50 of it is a big ass lake.  He obviously has more money than I’ll ever sniff in my lifetime because if he’s been able to stay alive in the rap industry for 5+ years, he’s definitely got some coin by now, but probably not enough to landfill up an entire lake and then build a fucking city on top of it.

Sure, I know the story backtracks and resigns itself to being more like a subdivision, but even still, that shit doesn’t build itself for free.

And doing a little digging, I found out that the parcel of land is really way the fuck out west, practically in Douglasville, and as successful as Thug might be, it’s a hard sell to get anyone who isn’t a Trump-loving white supremacist to want to go the fuck all way out to Douglasville, from Atlanta.

Whatever though.  Good on Young Thug for being successful to the point where people literally want to give him land as gifts, and when the day is over, I’m probably just envious of his general success and wealth, and all I can really do is keyboard warrior it from my brog out in the suburbs, wishing I had a fraction of the money he probably has.  Not quite the Oh Atlanta edition I thought it would be, but stranger writing swerves have occurred over the last 20 years of brogging.

Oh, Atlanta #376

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I last did one of these, yeah?  Mostly on account of the fact that in all the time between the last one and this one, the chance were pretty high that I simply just wasn’t checking any news, local or national, because I simply did not have the time and/or capacity to do so, and potentially run into something that makes words roll off the tongue (or fingertips) to brog about in the first place.  But sure as the rain falls in Georgia summers, I check the local news, the chances are high that I’m going to see something stupid that warrants some word barf.

Like these billboards that have been hung up in a few places in Greenville, South Carolina and now making their way into Atlanta, that supposedly are trying to send a message to the youths of these areas, to put guns down and presumably stop shooting other people.

At the core of these, the message is noble, and something that I do support; reducing gun violence.  But when it comes down to branding, awareness, the execution of a billboard, there’s just so much more wrong that I just can’t help but clown on it.

Like, I don’t know where to even start.  Do I go on about how the focal point of the message is all jacked up and could lead to misinformation, because GUNS NOW is all huge, that someone zipping by I-85 in Greenville or Atlanta, where the posted speed limits are anywhere from 55-70 mph with actual motorists usually going 80+, might not see the smaller text and just see GUNS NOW and become motivated to arm themselves?

Or that maybe in Atlanta where the gun violence is high but the education is low in the areas in which these billboards are up, the order of the messaging isn’t comprehended appropriately, and the wrong people read it as “put down the young people, GUNS NOW” and then they start breaking into other peoples’ cars to find guns, succeed, and then start shooting, young people.

Perhaps it’s the fact that “like” is in quotation marks, as if to encourage people to tongue-in-cheek, air quotes like them on, presumably, Facebook, because there’s a tiny-ass logo, but really don’t.  The use of quotation marks creates more confusing to their message than clarity, and confusion usually leads to harm.

The best part about it is that there’s no actual call to action on the billboard itself; I guess the closest thing is the fact that there is a Facebook logo, but really it’s up to Google to find this organization for you.  To its credit, it wasn’t that difficult to find a Facebook page of the same name which appears to be one and the same, but then there are all these visuals of inconsistent naming; the billboard says “Put Down the Guns Now Young People” but then there’s a bigass banner where the gun is no longer plural, and as someone in marketing, all I can do is shake my head and wince at the inconsistent use of messaging, which is among the top three faux pas when it comes to any sort of establishing brand voice.

Either way, although the message is noble and one that I could get behind, the execution is just far too shoddy and ineffective at getting its point across that I’m afraid I might be more encouraged to get a GUN NOW, because seeing those words in a giant splatter of blood makes me feel like I might need to arm myself to protect myself from those vile young people.

Yeah good luck with that

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Job Creators Network sues Major League Baseball for $100M and demands that the 2021 All-Star Game be returned to Atlanta

Sometimes I wonder if third-parties like this get involved in scenarios like this because they actually care, or if they’re just chasing the potential to get some free money in a settlement when and if an entity like MLB just doesn’t feel like dealing with this bullshit and is willing to throw some money at it in order to get it out of their hair.

Obviously with a case like this it’s undoubtedly going to be the former, because anyone with a brain knows that it’s nigh impossible to go at a gozillion dollar company like MLB and actually expect to have a fighting chance.  Frankly, I’d love to see MLB take it on and potentially counter-sue for the inconvenience and bury a shitty-sounding organization like “Job Creators Network” into oblivion.

Normally, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge an organization that sounds like it’s trying to create jobs, but when I saw this blurb, I kind of felt like I knew what I needed to know to be able to determine a side I’d rather side with:

The lawsuit was filed in New York City by attorney Howard Kleinhendler, who was also involved in several failed lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

So basically some baked potato-supporting brainless fucks who are picking fruitless fights for no real good reason.

The funny thing is that I normally love to see when MLB or Braves Corporate get owned, but in this particular instance, I have to stand with MLB, but at least Braves Corporate is still getting owned in the process.

Because there is a 0% chance that the All-Star game is coming back to Atlanta, and I’d like to see it remain that way; for both symbolic reasons that Georgia’s Jim Crow 2.0 personally ushered in by Bubba Kemp is horrific and flagrant, and that Braves Corporate, Truist and all their crooked cronies, constituents and talking heads are humiliated, owned and denied all the money that an All-Star game would’ve brought to them.  Bonus also being a big super-spreader event avoiding Atlanta Smyrna, alleviating roads, businesses and traffic.

Either way, this is a story that’s pathetic on all fronts, no matter what source it’s read from.  It’s a waste of time, money and resources for those who have to deal with it, and a perfect example of peoples’ eager willingness to do it in order to gain notoriety, exposure and potentially free money if the right people just want to see it go away.