I’m sure a college team wouldn’t have gotten blown out by 61

March 23, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As if I ever needed any more reason to harp on the fact that the NBA today is utter crap, along came this game the other night where the Memphis Grizzlies lost to the Charlotte Hornets – by 61 points. I had to stop and do the math in my head when I saw the final 140-79 score to verify that it really was a 61-point blowout, and yep sure enough, the Hornets blew out the Grizzlies by 61 points.

It’s no surprise to me the frequency in which I see 30-point blowouts with regularity in today’s NBA scores, but to see it somehow doubled up, now that takes a tragic amount of effort in futility to attain. Seriously, I was an NBA fan in an era where 20 points was considered a blowout, and they really didn’t happen that often. The most lopsided wins I’d ever seen in my life in the NBA up until the turn of the century was this extreme abomination clunker of a game where the Knicks beat the Jordan-led Bulls by 32 points during the 96 season in which the Bulls still won 70 games, and this stinker of a game by the Jazz in the NBA Finals, where they got blown out by 42 points by the Jordan-led Bulls.

But those were just two games in nearly a decade of watching basketball in which I saw such gargantuan blowouts. The Grizzlies somehow managed to lose by a bigger margin (61) than the total score the Jazz put up in that 1998 game (54). 61 points was typically the average score of any team that lost to the defense-heavy, hard hitting Pat Riley-coached New York Knicks teams of the 90s.

To put it in perspective, the only time that I, and probably most people my age, have ever seen a 60+ blowout was in 1992, when the United States Dream Team featuring Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and other superstars blow out a star-struck squad from Angola by 68 points. The 2018 Charlotte Hornets might be owned by Michael Jordan, but there sure as shit aren’t players remotely close to his level of greatness, that still managed to blow out the Grizz by 61.

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I guess kids will have no choice but to grow up now

March 18, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I guess it’s getting to the point where it’s inevitable that the things of our youths ultimately end up dying slow and undignified deaths. I kind of wonder if this is one of those generational things that happens to every generation, but given the fact that some of these iconic companies are often times nearly 30, 40, or 50+ years old, I’m going to have to lean towards that such might not be the case for every generation.

Now I’ve gotten nostalgic and poetic waxy about franchises of my own youth, like K-Marts, Old Country Buffets and Sears, but the impending death of Toys ‘R Us is a pretty hefty blow in its own right. Whereas the deaths of most of the other aforementioned businesses tended to hit grownups the hardest, there’s almost something cruel about a business that primarily made their bread on butter on the wants of children getting the axe now.

I mean, business is most certainly an unforgiving, indiscriminate venue, but taking it out on the children seems especially harsh. It’s no secret that lots of people hate Walmart, and Target and Amazon are pretty universally loved, but when it really comes down to it, all of them, as well as all other businesses that could be considered competition were all involved in twisting the knife that eventually succeeded in bringing death towards the most iconic toy retailer, at least of my entire lifetime.

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Growing Up Type-R

January 24, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know I touched on this subject before in the past at some point, but seeing as how the car has been green lit very similarly to the initial concepts, it doesn’t hurt to revisit this. Sure, cars rarely change dramatically from their concept stages, and I wasn’t expecting the Civic Type-Riceboy to go from Gran Turismo Edit B pocket rocket to a sleek sophisticated sleeper, but we all can wish, right?

Anyway, upon seeing the updated photos of the release model, the first thought that popped into my head was the immediate comparison to the Homer Simpson car that tanked his half-brother’s original fortune, that’s how clown-y it looked, with its giant spoiler that I’m sure will be described as “aggressive” and face that looks like a smashed down Stormtrooper helmet.

And that’s just the superficial details that aren’t to the standard that I once held the vaunted Civic Type-R when I was still 19.

Mechanically, it’s definitely the strongest Civic, and one of the strongest Hondas in general off the factory line in history, but there too, it seems to have lost all the cool shit that made Hondas back in the late 90s. An alleged 306 horsepower is advertised, but it’s coming from a turbocharged 2.0 liter with a redline of “just” 6,500 rpm.

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I am a fan of teens eating Tide Pods

January 16, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The long and the short of such a remark is that it’s simply accelerating Darwinism that the stupid and weak evacuate existence faster than nature may have originally intended to. I’m not a fan of stupid people, and unfortunately the world is quite overloaded with them anyway. I’m also not a fan of mercilessly killing people for the sake of reducing the population of unsavory people, but when people croak on account of their own stupidity because they think it’s funny or are so starved for internet attention that they resort to eating laundry detergent, then it’s really out of all of our hands here.

I’m long past writing out the words “just when I thought people couldn’t get any dumber” because I learned a long, long time ago that no matter how low the bar may be lowered to, people will always, always find the ways to make it sink even further. Frankly, teenagers deliberately staging fake tripping incidents in grocery stores while holding gallons of milk or juice seems like Mensa-caliber compared to people eating Tide Pods. Or when thousands of people managed to organize and gather… for a Rick & Morty themed chicken nugget sauce that pretty much barely existed, and were ultimately owned by McDonalds when they all had to be told that they didn’t have any; those buffoons seem like MIT’s class of 2020 now.

Frankly, I wasn’t really surprised or concerned when I found out that teenagers eating Tide Pods was a thing recently. If I think tons of people my age and generation are idiots, it’s a no-brainer that their offspring that’s budding into today’s teenage class are going to be just as stupid, and in this case, somehow manage to be even dumber. Not only is the risk of ingesting laundry detergent clearly labeled on all packaging, the thought of eating it isn’t remotely appealing or worth the risk in order to get twelve people to see it on social media.

But whatever, if kids want to eat Tide Pods and kill themselves in the process, go ahead and let them. If they’re dumb enough to be doing so in the first place, it’s kind of doing the world a favor and getting them out of the way so that the actual cream of the crop can rise and make something of this wasteland of a world that we’re living in. I’m not promoting death, but far be it for us to stand in the way of natural selection, and if kids are knowingly swallowing poison on their own volition because it’s what they think will get them attention, then I should switch professions into the funeral industry, because there’s tons of money to be made there for this reason and so many more.

Is trick-or-treating dead?

November 1, 2017August 4, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I moved into my house, I often noticed the sheer volume of children in my subdivision. Riding around on bicycles, and dragging their feet shuffling home after getting off of the school bus that clogs the road at 4:30 every day. I thought to myself that, all i-hate-kids nihilism aside, that it was still a pleasing atmosphere to see, especially in contrast to the warzone that my previous home’s subdivision was devolving to.

All this said, I would have wagered money that come Halloween, my neighborhood would be a veritable hotbed for trick-or-treaters, since there were already a lot of children in the neighborhood, and that my subdivision seemed kind of tailor-made for trick-or-treating since it was relatively flat, homes moderately spaced out and looked affluent enough to attract children into thinking good candy were abundantly available. With such in mind, my home was very well stocked for the freeloaders, with the hopes that maybe a fistful of the stuff would be left for us afterwards.

Which brings us to this morning, where I’ve got a bowl still practically overflowing with candy, and Halloween saw less than like, 30 kids coming to my door. And we had jack-o-lanterns, fake tombstones and a decorated door with blinking lights to indicate that my home was game for the kids.

So I have to ask now, is trick-or-treating pretty much dead these days?

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The death of an era

October 6, 2017August 4, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Pour one out soon: AOL Instant Messenger announces it will shut down permanently in December after 20 years of being the penultimate forefront of instant messaging over the internet

Honestly, I don’t think anyone is really ever going to fully understand the importance of AIM in my life, or that I am going to be legitimately sad when it logs off for good on December 15^th. And this isn’t so much of just another “something from Danny’s childhood is vanishing for good” kind of emo as much as it is a genuinely true passing on of something that was very integral to my daily living for nearly two full decades.

I still have my original screen name for when I was even still an AOL subscriber for $19.99 a month, and I logged on through their software on a 2400 baud then eventually a 33.6 kbps modem, and have been using it as recently as 2015. Back when I originally made it, I didn’t even grasp what an ISP was, and didn’t realize internet access even existed outside of AOL. I also remember knowing it tied up phone lines and made accessing my house over the phone nearly impossible for whenever my sister and I weren’t fighting over computer time and someone was parked at it, chatting away on the world wide web.

Through AOL did I come and go through my tremendous anime weeb phase of my life, but along the way I made lots of internet friends whom I’d shared countless hours and nights chatting away with and role-playing Ranma 1/2 characters in cleverly-named Members chat rooms. I had like two different internet girlfriends at various points, one of whom I’d actually met in person once at an Anime Expo which was a completely different rabbit hole, but the point is, I learned it was entirely possible to meet, make and maintain real human relationships over the internet in spite of all the endless skepticisms that it was full of creepy terrible predators.

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