Tag: social media

Sound logic

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Atlanta rapper encourages people to use paintballs instead of actual bullets, if one must satiate the need to shoot firearms.  The message was seemingly intended to curb violence; except when some dickheads unleashed a torrent of paintballs on a bunch of people at a public gas station, one enraged 15-year old fired back – with a real firearm.  And of course, a toddler was inadvertently struck and killed in the completely unnecessary and preventable fracas, and so now a child is dead and a teenager is in all likelihood going to prison for a long time and the people shooting paintballs who started the whole incident are nowhere to be found.

Hashtag Atlanta not the TV show

It’s a little difficult who really should be responsible for the root of this whole incident.  On one hand, we have some c-list rapper using his social media reach to even put the wise idea into the heads of little impressionable wannabe thugs that shooting guns is okay as long as it’s with paintballs and not actual bullets.  On the other hand, the dumbasses he influences aren’t really his responsibility, and he’s not the one who fired at actual people, since his own genius video documentation of him vandalizing things were usually inanimate objects.

I think the seeds to why I felt like writing about it is simply the fallacy of the intention of suggesting paintballs over bullets; which is basically why shoot anything at all?  In what world outside of the Middle East are people afflicted with the urge to need to shoot shit to where a suggestion of paintballs over bullets would even be made in the first place?  Look, I know coming from America there’s a lot of irony in that statement, but still, there’s something seriously wrong with the idea of if you must shoot guns is even a perceived thing in the first place.

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The whitest, most privileged feud since Duke vs. Yale

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Have your slave butler get the popcorn: the NRA is outraged with the YETI cooler company for deciding to cease their partnership as an NRA vendor, demands that their mindless, gun-crazy followers and underlings boycott

Is there anything more entertaining than two icons of things white people like feuding with each other?  In one corner, we have the YETI cooler company, the fairly young company that manufactures supposedly high-end coolers and drink receptacles that white people go gonzo over.  And in the other corner, we have the ageless and timeless National Rifle Association, the biggest punching bag save for the president himself for the left, rife with criticism for the fact that there’s a shooting almost every single day, primarily by white people, but that doesn’t change the fact that the alleged majority of NRA due-paying members are white.

And at first blush, it looks like the young white company has decided to distance its partnership with the company helmed primarily by old white people, and the old white people are none too happy about it.

Honestly, this does make YETI look a little more favorable in my eyes.  No, this isn’t going to make me drop what I’m doing and go drop $200 on a fucking cooler, when a $5 Styrofoam gas station box and 50¢ worth of ice accomplish the exact same thing, but it will take YETI out of my crosshairs as something to criticize because I for the life of me can’t comprehend why white people go so bonkers over a company that makes overpriced coolers and has the branding of all caps Arial Black on a black rectangle that makes me wonder what the fuck I’m doing with my career; yeah, it’ll prevent me from elaborating on that thought, with 700 more words.

But it doesn’t change the fact that seeing a good old fashioned white-on-white conflict makes me giddy with ironic anticipation at seeing two sissies getting into a slap fight.

Seriously, YETI vs. the NRA is the best white-on-white feud I’ve seen since Duke got paired up against Yale in the 2016 Men’s NCAA basketball tournament. 

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Thirty-six

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Doesn’t feel any different than how thirty-five was.  I have the same mundane grown-up responsibilities as I did the year prior, I still feel like time is flying faster and faster the older I become, and physically I don’t really feel much different than I did when I was twenty-six.  I still feel pretty out-of-touch with the trends of the world, I’m quick to find popular trends obnoxious, and I often feel like nothing today stacks up to how things were in the past. 

The only slightly noticeable difference is that I think I’m approaching the age in which unfortunately, death is emerging as a more prevalent presence in the lives of everyone around me, and with the ever-present presence of social media, it’s so quick and easy to spread the bad news of whenever anyone passes.

My brog is still down, but if all goes according to plan, maybe by the summer, I’ll have taken the necessary steps and effort in order to get it back up on the internets for the forseeable future.

I don’t really know why I’m writing all of this; despite the fact that I’m pretty low-key and reluctant to speak about my birthday to my peers and acquaintances, I still feel some sort of necessity to write something on my birthday, as if it’s some sort of slate cleaning and arrival of a fresh canvas to decorate with the happenings of another year of life.

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You know what fucking sucks?  Live tweeting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was Sunday, April 9th, 2018.  I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for my flight from Orlando to Atlanta to start boarding so we could begin our journey back home.  Mythical gf and I had just spent a lovely weekend at Disney World where we couldn’t possibly have gotten any better weather than we did.  We dined on a lobster bake at Disney Springs, imbibed in refreshing beverages at the Hangar Bar.  We leisurely ate around the floral world at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, and I caught a Heracross in Pikachu Game, the South American exclusive while there.  And due to some strategic planning on account of some typical Florida rain, we managed to ride the Avatar ride that typically has anywhere from a 3-4 hour wait with regularity, in under an hour.

It was a lovely trip.

However, Sunday, April 9th 2018 was also the same day that Wrestlemania 34 was scheduled.  Obviously, seldom am I ever going to prioritize a wrestling show over mythical gf, and I didn’t even bother crosschecking when WM was going to be when we planned our trip, not that it would have impacted anything in the least bit.  But the fact of the matter was that I still wanted to watch the show when I got back home and had a good 3-6 hours of free time because when taking into account of TakeOver and the pre-show and all the promos, who really knows how much time the ‘rasslin is going to account for.

This is often how I keep up with wrestling these days, watching things after they’ve aired, so that I can really flesh out the main storylines and plots without having to sit through all the commercials and extraneous fluff.  Obviously, I run the risk of encountering spoilers on a regular basis, but seeing as how WWE programming runs every single week, and multiple times a week, and the fact that personally I don’t know a tremendous amount of people that are really still into wrestling, it’s typically never really a problem to indulge in wrestling the way I do.

Except, when it comes to the big pay-per-view shows; like Summer Slam, the Royal Rumble, or, Wrestlemania.

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jk, this is the worst of social media

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Well, that didn’t take long.  Leave it to the internet to accept any challenge whenever anyone thinks they’ve hit a low point, to somehow continue to find more ways to test peoples’ opinions on humanity further.

By now, I’m pretty sure most people heard about how a shooter converged on YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California and wounded three people before supposedly killing herself afterward.  She was apparently really, really pissed off about how she felt like her First Amendment rights were being violated, so she flexed her Second Amendment right to bear arms and take it out on a bunch of people, most of whom probably had nothing to do with content suppression or the censorship of her stupid “channel” that wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as she thought it might’ve been.

Man, to think back in the day (2017), if you had a dispute with a company and they weren’t paying you, you first try to settle it by yourself, and failing that, get a lawyer, contact the Better Business Bureau, etc., etc., and try to settle it legally.  But nah, forget all that time-wasting shit, let’s just go out and get some guns and shoot up their offices.  That’ll get you paid real quick.

Either way, yet another shooting spree on American soil just occurred, and to nobody’s surprise, society’s gotten so desensitized to this happening that it’s pretty much already secondary news by this point.  Probably because there weren’t enough casualties save for the shooter herself, so there’s not enough bleed for this story to lead, for long enough.

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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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