Tag: programming

Post #3,000: I’m basically the Ichiro of brogging

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Unlike when I surpassed the 2,000th post to my brog, I was very aware of my post count as I crept closer and closer to #3,000. 

As a baseball fan who loves statistics and numbers, I knew a post like this was going to take shape.  3,000 is a big deal to baseball fans, because it’s among the most immortal of milestones, primarily when it comes to strikeouts for pitchers and hits for batters.  And because I’m a baseball fan who likes to write and brog, it’s a big deal to me that I’m closing in on my 3,000th post.

Furthermore, it’s always been a big deal to me to remain consistent, dedicated and committed to my personal brog that nobody reads, because throughout the passage of time, I’ve witnessed countless people try and start blogs, and they’ll do great for a few days, weeks, and maybe a month, but inevitably, they all give up. They throw in the towel, make excuses, and just plain fail.

Professional athletes, interesting people, wrestlers, baseball players, and numerous friends and acquaintances that I know all fall into this category.  There are people who have even been paid and made an occupation of blogging, who even fail and lose their resolve and give up.

And all these people who fail and give up, it’d be easy to say not mad just disappointed to them all, but I know I am in the tremendous minority of minorities of people who can remain dedicated to something as senseless and important to nobody but myself as I am.  Instead of passing too much judgment whenever I see someone start their own blog, I just kind of take a mental stopwatch and try to remember when they started, so I can try to guess when they invariably failed.

Because not everyone can be like me.  I’m like the Ichiro of brogging, which is a little ironic considering there’s a nationalistic dislike for him which is made all the more appropriate considering at the time I’m writing this, the World Baseball Classic has started up again and Korea has already shit the bed and is going to rely on a win against Japan in order to have a chance at survival.

But in spite of my feelings about Ichiro, he’s still arguably the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, with over 3,000 hits in MLB, and almost 2,000 more from his time in NPB.  And despite the fact that this is officially post #3,000 on my WordPress, there were still 483 posts over ten years from my brog when it was way more primitive, and I was posting individual HTML files to my old site.  Those are like my Japanese hits that few but me want to acknowledge, but in the grand spectrum of things, they’re just further justification of my brogging greatness.

So 3,000 posts in the can, and I have zero intention of ever stopping.  Sports and wrestling can come to an end but I’ll always find something to write about.  I have kids, I have a city where I live where I’m always going to be critical of, and I will always have an opinion on everything, and sometimes I will write about them.

It’s taken 13 years for me to make 3,000 posts on WordPress, I wonder if in 2036 I’ll be at or near 6,000?  Either way, as long as I live and breathe, we will eventually find out.

My boy isn’t well

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, I found out that my dog basically has cancer.  I kind of knew this was going to be the case, because when things like a hard lump that kind of grew out of nowhere are in play, the conclusion seems kind of forgone, but it doesn’t make it suck any less when the vet tells you it’s a tumor, and the real question really being just how bad of a cancer we’re dealing with here.

It’s funny, because I had the new vet at my clinic, the one with the least tenure there, which explains why she has the Saturday afternoon shift, but I was just glad that I was able to take my dog in at all today to get checked out in the first place.  But she’s pretty young, I imagine she doesn’t have the experience as some of the other doctors at the clinic do, so when she’s explaining things to me, she’s using a lot of technical and medical terminology, and seemingly avoiding use of the dreaded C-word.

It isn’t until I explain to her that a lot of the terminology is going over my head, and I couldn’t help but notice the seemingly deliberate avoidance of using the word “cancer,” and that I would really appreciate a little more dumbed down explanation of what’s going on.  The tech leaves the room at this point for some reason, and the doc is a little more clearer with the explanation, and I feel like I have a little more understanding of the situation to where I can at least brog about it.

The lump is definitely a tumor, but the clinic doesn’t have the on-site resources to do anything beyond a cursory examination, and sending out slides is really the only way we’re all going to get some more accurate clarity to what we’re dealing with.  Given the circumstances of how it appeared to have appeared and grown fairly rapidly over the span of the last two months, things don’t appear to be very optimistic, but again, never going to know until we get some more concrete evidence.

It doesn’t help the fact that my boy is anywhere from 15-17 years old, which is well at or past life expectancy for his general breed, and the fact that he also has a grade-4 heart murmur.  Adding cancer on top of it is like a fucked up cherry on top, but him being the goodest boy on the face of the planet, is still acting fairly normal, his behavior and temperament are still his usual cheerful self, and he’s eating, drinking, pooping and peeing as a normal dog would.  Even the girl doing clean-up in the lobby was astounded to hear that he’s (estimated) 16 years old.

But that’s where we’re at right now.  My good boy is not doing well, in spite of the pep he continues to exhibit.  Regardless of what the full diagnosis is going to be, the options are not many, nor are they even likely to work, if they’re even possible at all.  At his age, it’s not lost on me that we’re definitely in the final act of his expected lifespan, but it never doesn’t suck for pet owners to come to grips with the mortality of their companions, and all I can really think about are all the things I feel guilty to him about not being a better owner; like an asshole, thinking about myself, when he’s the one dealing with fucking cancer, and no-selling it like Hercules vs. Sid because he’s the best dog there is and he’s showing way more strength than I am, and doesn’t even realize it.

But he’s not gone yet, and hopefully my life can get its shit together enough to make the even more likely limited time I have with him somewhat better and rewarding.  Two years ago, I had concerns on whether or not he’d last long enough to get a picture with my first daughter with a shirt that had a dog that looked a lot like him on it.  Not only did we get a good picture, there’s now second daughter in the equation, and here’s hoping that we can repeat that history with her.

The 2021 MLB Playoffs post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Part of the challenge of trying to write posts from the past is that sometimes, there are particular topics that end up being more time sensitive than others, on account of the fact that they’re things like sports or live events to which if too much time passes, then the impetus for the original posts could become invalidated, and therefore useless to try to even bother writing about, retroactively.

That being said, I’m skipping the queue a little bit, and ultimately just going to make a singular post about the 2021 MLB Playoffs, because zero people who read my shit will give two shits about baseball playoffs, and the likelihood of me revisiting this topic with the time that I don’t have is pretty much not going to happen, but I wanted to put down some words that were going through my head before time passes and then I won’t be able to.

At the time I’m writing this, the National and American Leagues have both advanced to their respective championship series.  The Boston Red Sox vs. the Houston Astros in the American League, and in the National League, a rematch from last year – the Braves vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers.  In fact, the Braves have a 2-0 series lead on the Dodgers, to which where me simply acknowledging such a fact is condemnation for a repeat of last year, where the Braves Atlanta’d away their favor, and watched as the Dodgers went onto win a very winnable World Series.

To say that my excitement for the Braves having a 2-0 on the defending world champions is non-existent would be an understatement.  Last year proved that there is absolutely no reason to be excited for the Braves to actually succeed, as they pissed away both a 3-1 series lead, as well as killed all momentum for my theory of baby luck, and even though I could say baby luck is most certainly in play again this year, I learned my lesson last year to hold hopes that any Atlanta team could hold true to any superstition other than their inexplicable ability to choke no matter the circumstances.

Frankly, it’s a Christmas miracle and simply the crapshoot logic of divisions, rules and alignment that the Braves are here in the first place, and part of why everything is just so hilarious with the way things are standing right now.

The Braves won 88 games, which makes them literally the worst team in the entire playoff picture.  The Red Sox, Yankees, Cardinals and Dodgers, who were all the wild card teams who had to scrap for the ability to play in a play-in game to see who got to get into the real playoffs, all had more than 88 wins.  In fact, the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners who both missed the playoffs had 90 wins, but by virtue of the fact that the Braves played in the most putrid NL East division, and won it with 88 wins, they avoided the play-in game, and most hilariously, are considered the “higher” seed in the match-up against the 106-win Dodgers in the NLCS where they did their job and capitalized on the opening two games at home in Smyrna.

Now one thing I would stated that’s now been invalidated by the passage of time, is that the St. Louis Cardinals made the playoffs, and they are whom I would’ve bet the farm on going al the way, because as much as I hate the Cards, they’re just that one charmed team that always goes all the way if they can just get their toe into the door.  But they ran into the aforementioned 106-win Dodgers team, but not for lack of effort, considering the Cardinals deadlocked the Dodgers pretty much the entire game and it took a walk-off to send them packing.

I’m actually not that surprised that the Braves beat the Brewers in the NLDS.  If there were any team that I would’ve wanted the Braves to match up against, it would’ve been the Brewers, and most definitely not the Giants or Dodgers.  Had it been either of those two teams, the Braves would’ve been bounced from the first round like they do every other time they’ve made it into the playoffs.

And back to present time, where the Braves are up 2-0 on the Dodgers, and I still have 0% faith that they’re actually going to seal the deal, mostly on account of the fresh history of last year.  Furthermore, with the Red Sox and the Astros duking it out in the AL, MLB is salivating over the potential narrative of the Dodgers versus either one of those teams in the World Series, considering both teams were basically found out to have cheated against the Dodgers in prior World Series in 2017 and 2018.  

With the potential revenge storyline on the table, I wouldn’t put it past MLB to low-key sabotage the NLCS in favor of the Dodgers, and maybe we’ll see some more wonky check-swing strikeouts called by the umpires against the Braves, or maybe we’ll just see the Braves be the Braves and just implode on their own.  Either way, no matter that nobody will admit it, the Dodgers being in the World Series is what will be decided to be best for business, and what I’d expect to be the case by the end of next week when the pennants should be decided.

I don’t even know how to start writing again or where to even begin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like the title to this post says, I’m just like, have no idea on what to do in front of a blank document anymore.  I feel like a stereotypical author character in a story who’s got writer’s block, and is staring at a blank word document, with the cursor blinking over and over again, before they resort to more coffee and/or more alcohol, sometimes both.  Most recently demonstrated by Finn Wittrock in the most recent season of American Horror Story.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about, quite the contrary, it’s just that I have so many things I’d like to write about, somewhere around 15-16 notes that I took as things I’d like to write about, but it’s been so long since I did any sort of writing or had any modicum of time to do any writing, that I’m just in this state of disbelief and paralysis of not knowing what to do, which is why I’m ironically writing nonsense to try and get myself in the mood to write the usual array of niche-topic bullshit that I tend to write about in my blog outside of bitching about how hard parenting can be sometimes.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that as long as #2 has no set schedule or routine as she is still but an infant under three months old and cannot be set to such just yet, that I will have no time or no capacity for anything really self-serving or hobbies like writing, that require some time, silence and setting, because I’m really that much of a head case that likes to have such just to write about professional wrestling, baseball, veiled social commentary or any of the rando crap that I write about.  

But now that I’m on official paternity leave, I feel that it is important to try and carve out a sliver of time here and there to try and give myself a little bit of reprieve from dad mode, because I know I’m getting short with life in general because I’ve been going too hard too long and without any substantial breaks, and it’s going to do nobody any good if I continue to go on like this without any bit of self-care periodically.

So, I’m going to try and shoe-horn in some writing time in the coming weeks, on top of all of the other things I’d like to accomplish while I’m on leave, like yard work, refinancing my house, possibly researching a bigger car while my current one still has a lot of value, casual job searching, and occasionally getting in a run periodically so my physical being doesn’t deteriorate like Sim City roads and rails when you have to take too much tax dollars away from their budgets.

I will probably sticky this post and supplant the very deliberate sticky of the tragic passing of Sonny Chiba post I made that I’m still upset over, and probably retroactively back-post all the writing of things that I wanted to write about that might still warrant some writing about, and that is if it’s not too late to write about some of the things that might’ve been a little on the more time sensitive spectrum.  

Which are always fun-not-fun to write about, because there’s very little chance that I’ll be in the same mental states to write about things when the impetus to want to write about them in the first place might be as much as 3-4 weeks old, or if I already know what fallout/aftermath of particular events might have been.

But that’s the kind of person I am, where I’m staunch and stubborn and if I wanted to write about it at some point, there’s high chance that I’m going to write about it now, and either pretend like it was done live, or hope nobody notices, but most likely the latter since I have zero readers in the first place and I probably don’t need to disclaim this anyway but whatever.

Hello. It’s been a long time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t even really know where to begin.  It’s been so long since my brog was back online, and I’d grown used to the fact that I no longer had it, that I’m blanking on what to write now that it’s really up and running again.

The last time my brog was online, I was writing about the absurdity of Cody sleeping on a waterbed inside of his van in Wisconsin on Step-by-Step, and the country was ridiculing the idea that an orange baked potato was claiming to be running for president.

Now I’ve got a wife and an infant child, that orange baked potato is actually the president, and the country that ridiculed him has been brought to its knees by a global pandemic.

Crazy how much things can change in four years.

The thing is, throughout all the time in which I had no brog, I did not stop writing, and I continued to write as if my brog were going to be back up in four days and not four years.  Sure, it was disheartening and frustrating at times, since to me, my site was always more like the mouth my words and thoughts came from and how I primarily expressed myself, as opposed to the real mouth I have which is mostly where junk food is shoveled into, but ultimately the writing itself was the more important thing that I made sure to continue doing, because writing is my hobby and passion, and no matter if six people read my nonsense or zero, it was still very important to me that I did it anyway.

Once my brother was able to get my site back up online, it turns out that over the last four years, WordPress has surely made some strides, and all my old content was far too back in time for any sort of WP app or extension could successfully migrate all my old content into the present day dynamically. 

So whereas I could’ve just punted on all the old stuff, and start anew, that obviously is not how a nostalgic empath like me does things, so in a true labor of love, I went back in time, and manually backed each and every single brog post from February 2010 through April 2016 (1,621 posts), merged them with the queue of posts that I’d written offline (813 posts), and then one-by-one, post at a time, retroactively re-published each and every single one of them in chronological order, which brings us back into the present, where I have literally ten years worth of brog posts back up and online, for basically nobody’s satisfaction except my own.

Not that it really changes anything, but I also took this as an opportunity to integrate and utilize tagging, and if anything at all, I can see trends of the things that I gravitate towards writing about, even if I didn’t notice them back then.

It took 57 days to back up and repost all of the old brog’s content, in its (mostly) unedited and original words, regardless of if they were good, bad, fluffy, controversial, or things that I regret putting in writing, but we’ll touch on that later.  And then another 25 days to publish all of the “new” stuff, all in between the windows of time in which my infant child was sleeping, because ain’t nobody got time to do anything else when baby is awake.

But for all intents and purposes, my site is back.  After this much time, I can hardly believe it, but it’s up and online, and hopefully not going anywhere again any time soon.  As the dust settles, it’s my aspirations to get back to more of a normalized writing schedule, and before you know it, this’ll be a place to get opinionated commentary on the rigors of new fatherhood, on top of a lot of the old tropes and trends of things that I enjoyed writing about, like professional wrestling, the fuck-ups of Atlanta and Georgia, and other random topics, but also the likely observations and tribulations that I’ll inevitably go through in my journey into fatherhood.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
photo courtesy: Matt Altmix

As excited as I am to have my brog back up and running, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about how absolutely none of this happens if not for my brother.  For pretty much as long as I’ve known him, he’s been the rock in which my internet presence has always existed upon, and he’s literally hosted almost every iteration of my site(s) going on three decades now.

Back in like 2000, before my original webhost expired, he volunteered to host a mirror of my original site.  Eventually the subscription lapsed, and then the mirror became the primary.  As a joke, he purchased the domain needelsischeating.net to also point to my site, but then because I was poor and stupid, I let my domain lapse, get cybersquatted by eBay, and then needelsischeating.net became my primary domain.  Eventually, I would register totfc.net, which for those of you who don’t know, stands for TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN because when it comes to actual blogging, I firmly believe that is what I am, and it would become the domain I’ve had since, and my brother hosted it the entire time, all the way from when it was a catch-all site for a lot of all my internet bullshit, to when in 2010, I switched it to a WordPress, because I realized that the brogging was really the only thing I actually cared about.

It was a sad few years when the brog went down, because life gets in the way, and he had moved from North Carolina to Louisiana and then finally to Bratislava, and naturally, servers need to physically move as well.  And he had things going on in his life, as I had things going on in mine, as does everyone, so getting the site back up definitely sat on the back burner for all of us.

But with my daughter on the way and eventually having arrived, I always felt that I wanted to have my brog back up, because one, it was a logical and desired project for me to work on while I was out on paternity leave, but two, given the fact that I’ve definitely got plenty to say about being a new dad, and raising a baby in the midst of a pandemic, I really wanted to have an outlet in which I could actually share my thoughts, emotions and experiences to anyone who might want to stumble across and find my blatherings one day, if not my daughter herself, hopefully when she’s like 23, grown-up and capable of understanding and comprehending the words I’ve slapped onto the internet.  I mean, I’ve been brogging for 20 years now, who’s to say I won’t be doing it when she’s that old?

And as he always does, my brother came through, and took the time to dust off all my old shit, put it back up online, and put me into a position to where I could resurrect the brog.  I could’ve just picked back up from where I last left off, but I figured now was as good of time as any to try and at least remain somewhat in the present in terms of platform, and almost all of my free time over the last three months have been spent working away at this task, which brings us back to today.

I love him more than Floridians love Publix chicken tender subs, Philadelphians love Wawa, and more than he loves Bojangles.  And I want him, and all of my zero readers to know that, that I treasure his brotherhood, friendship and companionship, and that I thank him every single day for being the brother I never had, and hosting my decades of internet nonsense that really doesn’t mean anything to anyone except for me.

The last singles

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If I can pull the curtain back a little bit, whenever I sit down and write, there’s no guarantee that the most recent thing I’m writing is actually the most recent thing that’s actually happening.  Especially these days, I often times come across things or thoughts that spark the want to write, but I just simply don’t have the time to write, because I’m always busy at work, and by the time I get home, I’m either too busy to write or too fried to write.

In times like those, what typically happens is that I have a cloud-based document where I jot down the date and the general theme of what was going to be written, and if there’s any links that I want to refer to, that too.  And when I have the time and the motivation to do some writing, those are the things that I try to tackle first.  Typically, I don’t like the queue to grow too big, because then it gives me anxiety and a feeling of being worthless as someone who likes to write.  But there are exceptions to the queue, where I start writing about something in the true present, because usually there’s some degree of time sensitivity to where it’s not something that I can go back and write about retroactively.  At the time I’m writing this, there are three posts queued up that I still want to write about when I get the time.

Right now, is one of those moments.  Because the last few days, I’ve been coming to the realization that a lot of the things I’m doing, are the last time I’m doing them as a single guy.  Yes, melodramatic me is actually writing about the slow farewell to single, unattached life, because I’m two days from entering the wedded bliss of holy matrimony, and getting married.  What started out as mythical gf became mythical fiancé, and now I’m about to have a mythical wifey, and I’m actually going to be somebody’s husband.  Sucks to be them!

But anyway, it’s a lot of little things that I’m doing that I’m realizing are the last times I’m doing them as a single person.  All throughout the week, I’ve had my final chest and tris day as a single guy.  My last time running on the treadmill as a single guy.  Today was my last bis-shoulders-hamstrings day.  As the weekend progresses, I’ll have my last meals and drinks as a single person, and then when I’m at the altar, likely watching down at mythical fiancé coming down the aisle, probably looking radiant and beautiful, I’ll be ticking down my last minutes and seconds as a single person.

Continue reading “The last singles” →