Tag: politics

Daylight Savings blows, 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At around 5:20 am, I heard #1 outside my bedroom door, panicking in the dark about how she couldn’t find her sister.  The fact that my child was out of her room in the pitch black of the morning was enough to get me to pop out of my bed, but upon hearing that my other child was allegedly missing immediately put me into a state of panic myself.

Worse off, for some reason there was a light on in my sunroom, which I knew wasn’t the case when I went to bed because I’m neurotic and always make sure all lights are off prior to going upstairs; I would later discover that there was a power surge during the night, and since that room’s lights are controlled via remote control, it light switch is usually in the on position permanently, and stuff like power surges or outages usually result in lights coming on upon reconnection.  However, I didn’t know this, and it immediately put the fear of god into me that #2 was in some sort of danger.

I walked #1 back into their (we let them sleep in the same room on weekends sometimes, on the unfolded futon) room to have her wait for me while I would investigate downstairs, but upon entering the room, there’s #2 snuggled up like a little taquito on the futon already, still sleeping.  Relieved, I set #1 back onto the futon as well, covered her, gave her a kiss on the head, reminded her that it was the middle of the night and hope she bought it, and implored her to go back to sleep; she didn’t need to know her circadian rhythm was correct at thinking it should be 6:20 am, when she’s normally up for school on weekdays, because obviously I really wanted to get some more fucking sleep.

Nope, by 5:30 am, I can hear activity on the baby monitor, both girls are now awake, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I hear doors opening and shutting, and #1 is marching back into my bedroom, with moments later, #2 freaking out in the darkness of the hallway, wondering where everyone is.  I bring them both into the master, and get them into our bed, in between mama and dada, hoping they might actually go the fuck back to sleep for a little bit longer.

Naturally, that doesn’t happen, and by 5:40, I give up, get out of bed, usher the kids downstairs, and concede that the day is now beginning.

The thing is, I actually had a tentative plan about this morning, because I figured there would be some monkey business with the time change, and the chances of me having breakfast ready for awakening kids wasn’t going to be high, which was that we were definitely, going to go to Waffle House because who doesn’t love Waffle House?

It’s just I was not anticipating them to be getting up within the 5 o’clock hour, but here we were.

It actually wasn’t that terrible, I got them dressed and we were at Waffle House by like 6:30 adjusted time, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were not the only customers there.  They were definitely the only kids there, and a part of me was hoping to have seen some other parents under similar circumstances having the same plan that I did, but alas, it was just me who was carting my kids out at this ungodly bullshit adjusted time.

But the point remains, daylight savings remains the antichrist, and it’s abundantly clear that the people in the BC years who came up with the idea were a bunch of selfish fucks who either did not have children, or had the privilege or were bad parents enough to not take into consideration the effects of the time change on parents who did have children.  And I hate them for all eternity and hope their descendants are wholly unimpressive pleebs who have nagging gastrointestinal issues.

I like to imagine that if the originators of daylight savings actually had any children, that they were obligated to actually care for, ranging from ages 0-7 years of age, they would think twice about the whole concept of rolling clocks back and fucking with their circadian rhythms and suddenly having to deal with them at ridiculously early AM hours, while people under most other circumstances would still be getting to sleep, regardless of what hour it actually was.

And as I’ve said before, I didn’t care much for it prior to children, but now that I do have kids, I fucking loathe it, and I like to think I’m pretty serious about sticking to my claim that I’d vote for absolutely anyone who prioritized the abolishment of this bullshit antiquated concept, including, those Somali pirates.

The complaining will likely happen yearly, until either this bullshit program is killed off, or my kids get to the age where they want to sleep in, and therefore my entire house can actually benefit from the rollback instead of bemoaning it.  Not going to bet on the former, though.

Seems kind of ironic to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was driving home one day, and I decided to take an alternate route, because it might be a little longer as far as street distance goes, but there are fewer lights, and I was in one of those moods where I was over all the red lights that I seemed to be hitting.  There’s a point on this route where there’s this farm, that I’ve come to know as being owned by some obvious hard-right-wing nutjobs, as indicative by all the hard-right-wing signs that they plaster all over their property.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
PRAY FOR AMERICA
LET’S GO BRANDON
KEEP AMERICA GREAT
AMERICA FIRST

And the list goes on and on and on.  There’s pretty much no matter, no election or no opportunity missed by the people who live on this farm to spout their views or automatic support for whomever is repping the right.  In one hand, I kind of respect and wish that the not-left had such devout, obsessed and dedicated to voting and supporting their cause, and perhaps every single political arena wouldn’t be so fucking one-sided.  But in the other hand, fuck these shitheads and their support of just about everything I disagree in.

Anyway, as I was passing by today, there was a sign in their primary viewing sign space, that said: WE ARE CHARLIE.

I scrunched my brow at this one, and at the next red light I stopped at, I whipped out my phone to google it because I was curious.  Of course it had to do with the fairly recent assassination of some right-wing nutjob who had the same name, and I felt a microsecond of embarrassment at not realizing that sooner but on that same note I actively avoid politics as if discussing them will give me COVID.

Unsurprising, his death made him into a martyr to the right, and I guess saying WE ARE CHARLIE is some sort of defiant solidarity, and basically the white people version of everyone else saying that they are George Floyd, Sandra Bland, or any person that dare ever stood on the other side of the fence.

However, I couldn’t help but feel that there was some severe irony in the phrasing of WE ARE CHARLIE, because the very first thing that came to my mind is that “Charlie” was the nickname/slang/slur that US soldiers used to describe the opposing Vietcong forces during the Vietnam War.

Every skirmish was, against Charlie.  Charlie ambushing US forces.  Fuckin’ Charlie all over the place.  Spraying Agent Orange in the jungle to weed out Charlie.  Etcetera, etcetera.

Charlie is a term that has some hard negative connotation, especially for those who served, come from military backgrounds, or were impacted or affected by Vietnam in some way, shape or form.

And now we have white folks all over the American landscape who are now defiantly and proudly proclaiming to be, Charlie.  Okay

The ironic thing is that the Vietnam War more or less ended in 1975, which is just 50 years ago.  Across America and the rest of the world, there are still living people who fought in it; there are people who have killed, are widows and fatherless children from the conflict,  in the name of war, still alive today.  I can’t imagine that a lot of these people are all too thrilled to be seeing the word Charlie being used in such pro hard-right-wing propaganda, especially those who have and still suffer the effects of loss, death and PTSD.

Or perhaps I’m being presumptuous and giving too much credit to right-wing supporters to have the morals that would put something like this into question, and even they have no problem dropping their stigmas over the word Charlie and are more than happy to take it back if it supports their idiot beliefs.

Given the nature of modern politics, it’s probably the latter, unfortunately.

Because like I said, I saw this sign on a farm.  Farms are usually family joints passed down generations, and I’m going to go out on a limb and take a guess that if the owner of this farm didn’t fight in Vietnam, they’re probably descendants of someone who did, and because politics are unfortunately often times practically genetic at the success rate of offspring buying into their parents’ beliefs, I’d wager that through the 80s, 90s, 00s to up until a month ago, the name Charlie was probably something that was probably spit out, with some resentment, as opposed to being a phrase of solidarity and left-wing defiance.

One thing that I thought about though, that would be ironically funny, but not that funny because the loss of life isn’t really a laughing matter in most cases, but piggybacking onto the recent termination of AOL dial-up service, I’m imagining a scenario where the elderly final users of the service, now without any real internet service to brainwash them any further, have no idea about the whole Charlie situation, and have no clue that being Charlie is considered a good thing among their right-wing brethren.

And then ‘ol Hershel is going down the road in his 1957 Chevy pickup, and he drives past a house with a big ass WE ARE CHARLIE sign in their yard, triggering his PTSD.  Naturally he is packing, and he parks his truck, grabs his double barrel shotgun that’s on a mantle behind the driver’s seat, and storms into the house, and blows the fuck away out of some right-wing family.  Took care of that fuckin’ Charlie.

Right-on-right crime, just like the actual Charlie incident, from what I’ve heard.

Like I said, the loss of life in any case isn’t really that funny under most circumstances, but I’m just being honest here, if I were ever to catch wind that a scenario like this actually happened, I have to admit that I’d be kind of amused.

Wouldn’t it be funny if

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NPR: America Online to discontinue dial-up internet service which is still miraculously still available in the year 2025

Frankly, I’m astonished that AOL is even still in existence, much less their very specific dial-up internet service.  After Instant Messenger had the plug pulled from it back in like 2017, I wouldn’t have imagined that AOL had any product or asset at all remotely capable of keeping them afloat as a business, but here we are in the year 2025 where they’re not only still alive, but about to pull the plug on the very thing that put them on the map in the first place.

I mean, who among my general age range, didn’t ever have AOL?  It’s basically a rite of passage for elder xennials like myself, and probably most everyone could probably remember their very first @aol.com screen name slash email address.  And everyone was innately aware of the free trial CDs that were just about everywhere, and looking back at it, it worked in the sense that they saturated the playing field so heavily that for a while, internet access = America Online, much like soda became synonymous with Coca-Cola.

But before I can go down the rabbit hole of nostalgia and wax poetic all day about stories involving AOL, I’m just going to get back to the point of this whole post, and finally wrap up the title of this post because I don’t write as often as I want to lately and I can’t get myself sucked into my own vortexes of words instead of getting to the point of the things that I actually do want to write about.

But anyway, wouldn’t it be funny if, with the elimination of AOL dial-up service, it completely turns the tide of the political battlefield in America?  With the obvious implication that GOP supporters are mostly a bunch of antiquated olds who only have their internet access via AOL dial-up, and when the service is taken away from them, they lose their umbilical cord to the modern world, and either shrivel up and die sooner from boredom, or without the bullshit they currently imbibe on, on the regular, their minds actually clear up and break free from the brainwashing they’ve all been subject to over the span of the last few decades.

Like I kind of write this partially in jest, but at the same time, there’s a shred of hope of believing that this might actually come into play in the future.  The numbers (well maybe not necessarily) don’t lie, GOP voters are on average 726 years old, and short of having shitty brainwashed tech-savvier children setting up their internet, I have to make the assumption that there’s a tremendous overlap between Republican voters and AOL dial-up users. 

And since neglecting the elderly knows no political affiliation, there’s no guarantee that when AOL dial-up goes offline in September, there’s actually going to be people readily available to swap these geriatrics onto any form of higher-speed internet, and thus begins the prophetic disconnection with the modern world for these demographics, and it lowers their chances to be auto-right voters come the next election.

Yes, there are a ton of holes in this logic, but all I’m saying is that it would be real humorous to me that come 2028, the next election is seemingly way less dramatic and there’s a surreptitiously noticeable reduction in Republican voters, from a very specific demographic, and I for one will immediately point to this specific news story about how AOL killed their dial-up, and inadvertently changed the fate of the entire country in the process.

/goodbye.wav

Hate to see it, but it’s not like it isn’t deserved

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NBC: Fewer international tourists are visiting the United States; economic losses estimated to be ‘staggering’

Like the subject says, this is one of those things that most Americans probably wouldn’t like to see or know of, but at the same time, it’s not like it isn’t deserved, and I can only hope that there are more businesses whose owners and managers that voted for the dumbass orange turd in Washington are being affected by this over those who didn’t.

Like, America was no saint of a destination before dumbass orange turd took office again, but now that he is, I can’t imagine why anyone outside of the United States would have any real inkling of desire to visit it, save for experiences like, Disney World or Las Vegas.  But frankly, even those probably have better alternate options, like the numerous other Disney properties in Europe or Japan, and casinos in Macau or Italy.

I always go back to this particular story of how I came back from an international trip, and had a layover in JFK, and had to clear customs there before catching my next flight back to Atlanta.  I remember seeing these foreign tourists struggling immensely to get through customs because they spoke little-to-no English, and the customs agents were all salty New Yorkers who spoke nothing other than English and basically the faces of these tourists were miserable and scared, and I felt bad that this was basically how their trip was starting in the United States.

Meanwhile, mythical then-gf and I had gotten back from Germany or Korea or wherever we were, and the customs agents in all these places spoke English, weren’t miserable New Yorkers, and were by and not entirely unpleasant experiences getting past them to our destinations.  I remember when we got out of the airport in Munich, and there were already holiday booths and vendors and it was airy and pleasant, and compare that to walking out the door of JFK or any American airport, which is usually just a lot of unhinged drivers trying to pick people up, power-tripping security blowing whistles and screaming at people, and just a whole lot of ugliness, and I always wonder why anyone with a brain would actually want to visit the United States.

Furthermore, like the above photo shows, there’s a meme out there of all sorts of countries around the world, where people say they’re going to visit, when they’re really referring to small sections of each respective country; like all the weebs who say they’re going to Japan are really referring to Tokyo or Osaka, all Koreebs are really visiting Seoul when they say Korea, Paris to France, London to England, and frankly most Americans aren’t aware that Amsterdam is but a city in Holland and not the country itself.  The same applies to the United States, where most anyone from outside of it, when they say they’re coming to visit America, really is saying they’re visiting places like New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington DC, or Disney World (obviously not Orlando).  Everywhere else is pretty much not America as far as the eyes of the average tourist goes.

All the same, as much as I hope nobody I know is affected by the financial windfall of dwindling tourism, it’s one of those scenarios where it’s smirk-worthy with that I told you so kind of vibe, that this was inevitable to happen with the current political regime that basically has told everyone else outside the country to fuck off, and them being surprised that nobody wants to come visit anymore.

It’s like if people are getting hurt by this development on account of shitty leadership, a lot of people have nobody to blame but themselves for voting for a leader who’s so racist and xenophobic and is the chief reason why tourism dollars are evaporating and that nobody wants to come visit America.  But at the same time, it’s not like this should be anything of a surprise, once our glorious leader kept flapping his gums about America’s so-called superiority, so I guess all I can really say at this point is, owned.

Clever move, Adobe

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

HRD: Adobe says we’re done with DEI

I put in a conceited effort to pay attention to as little mainstream news as I possibly can, but I’m always going to find out about some things here and there, simply by existing.  Among them, I know that DEI is a hot button topic, with the orange clown show in Washington having declared war on DEI, and all sorts of schools, businesses and corporate entities all taking highly-scrutinized stances on it.

Like I know that Target has been accused of turning heel on the liberal-minded by declaring they are not going to continue supporting DEI, and Costco has benefited from it because they have taken the opposite stance, and will continue to do such.  Colleges and companies across the country have scrapped their DEI initiatives because Washington has basically put a gun to the heads of everyone who is too craven to stand against such bullying, and as usual, the world is a worse place than the day before it, like every single day now.

It might be right-wing of me to say this, but I do have mixed feelings about DEI.  In principle, it sounds good, because I’m all for diversity, equity and inclusion.  Everyone should get a fair shake in this world, no matter their circumstances and lifestyles.  It’s just that throughout the rise and existence of DEI, it’s been politicized and implemented completely with the wrong intent and motivation, and when such is the case, it kind of is the detriment that the bozos in Washington accuse it to be. 

I’m not saying that I support it being forcibly removed all over the place, I do believe that the world is a slightly better place with DEI as a concept than not, it’s just that I would like for it to be a thing that comes from a genuine place of wanting inclusion, and not becoming an obnoxious company quota system, like it sometimes feels like it has been throughout the country.

But back to the point of this post and what spurned this diatribe, Adobe joins the camp of companies and entities out there that has publicly declared their discontinuation of DEI practices.  And it’s easy for them to do such, because they’ve hard monopolized the graphics industry, and their existing users will have a real hard time to find alternatives to all the things that they need to do in order to do their jobs.

However, there’s an extremely easy joke in all this, because any graphics or video person in the world who has ever used any Adobe software at all, might remember the days when the splash screens for initializing any piece of Adobe software at all would remember that they used to have credits and acknowledgments in them, and basically every single name listed were people who clearly were not the Ryan Joneses or Jacqueline Kennedys or any names that indicate that a company really needs to hire some more minorities.

And as the joke goes, DEI for a company like Adobe really means that they really actually need to hire more white people.  But now that they’re scrapping their DEI initiatives, that requirement is now dead and out the window, and as much as I jadedly clown on Adobe for their shitty rushed products, I think it’s hilarious the strategy in which they employed with this announcement, that they frankly don’t have to worry about hiring white people in order to meet their quotas.

Frankly, if I ruled the world, I’d institute hiring practices that eliminated candidate names and photos and any other physical indicators out of the equation, until later in the candidacy process.  Let candidates’ qualifications, competencies and perceived ability to do jobs be the determining factor at what gets people in the door of places.  Get rid of Affirmative Action, DEI and any other concepts that have come to fruition solely in order to diversify pictures for the sake of diversification. 

Obviously, such would never happen, but I’m just spitballing here.

Either way, good on Adobe for cleverly stepping away from DEI initiatives when they did, because they’re definitely a company that could probably use some more white folks, but now that they’ve said what they’ve said, they’re not at all legally obligated to hire whites in order to meet any quotas.

I miss the pandemic, for real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, or even posted about it before, but I really do miss the pandemic.  This thought usually crosses my mind whenever I’m in a scenario that wouldn’t have existed during the pandemic, like being stuck in traffic on my commute to the office, or in this most recent episode, whenever an illness permeates its way into my house and waylays fucking everyone, leading to several miserable days for all.

A stomach bug of some sort, was picked up by both #2 and I concurrently, most likely at a birthday party that only we went to on Monday; Tuesday was the customary incubation day for said bug, and by Wednesday in the AM hours, shit hit the fan and we were both victims of near-identical symptoms, all of them unpleasant.  It should also be noted that Wednesday was #1’s birthday, which meant I literally spent the entirety of my own child’s birthday in bed and basically incapable of functioning.

Thankfully, #1 was not ill on her birthday, but what I feared most came to fruition the night prior, which led to this avalanche of thoughts and emotions manifesting into a salt-filled, nihilistic sounding post about how I thought the world was a vastly superior place when a killer pandemic was ravaging through it.  But Thursday was apparently the incubation day for #1, and by the AM hours, shit hits the fan, and then it’s me, of course, at like 70% myself, as the one staying up until 4:30 in the morning catching her vomiting every single half hour while the bug takes its turn with her.

Shit like this, would never have occurred during the pandemic.  The common cold didn’t happen at all, during the pandemic.  It was one of the most glorious years in human existence, 2020 was, where there wasn’t even a single day over the span of a 365-day span except for one exception which I won’t delve into, where anyone in my house was sick.  No questionable mornings where anyone woke up with a tinge in the sinuses, and requiring some preventative care, no sniffles after going out somewhere, not a single cold, much less the flu, any sinus infections or stomach bugs like the one ravaging my house right now.

No god damn sicknesses whatsoever, and it was marvelous.  But in retrospect, there’s no way that would have been allowed to continue, because that would have basically killed the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and can’t possibly have healthy populations when there’s profits to be made for white folks.

But in addition to the sheer lack of sicknesses rewarded to the intelligent who exorcised caution, it was a world where nobody had to commute into offices, remote work was the norm and championed and applauded at the adaptability and fluidity of the workforce, and not politicized and weaponized as it’s been today.

And speaking of politics, it’s the then-administration’s sheer idiocy behind pandemic response that basically united a country to boot out the orange clown from his first dictatorship, and for a brief moment in time, it genuinely felt like the United States were back to becoming America again instead of being shitty ‘Murica.

Naturally, no good thing is truly ever allowed to last, and when the dust settles, Americans always falls back into their self-destructive patterns, and here we are back to dictatorship #2, which has somehow managed to feel even more terrifying than the first one.

At this point, I genuinely wouldn’t mind if some fucking savages at a Chinese wet market started trying to eat some moar bats or some possums or some other feral wild animal, and try to get COVID-29 started up to try and correct the world all over again.  I know many probably think that the parties involved in the original COVID-19 bat-eating scenario are a bunch of hindsight murderers, but frankly I see them as quite the contrary, and wouldn’t mind if that shit fired itself up again, if it would bring us back to the utopia that 2020 really turned out to be in retrospect.

I’m tired of commuting to the office, I’m sick of stupid fucks who go out while sick with no regard for the people around them, and I’m sick to fucking death of those people passing those illnesses onto my families and allowing them into my home.  I know COVID-19 took a lot of people out, but I’m having a real hard time, especially as time goes on, at thinking their negatives actually outweigh all the positives that emerged from the time.

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.