Tag: social media

Free is a four-letter word

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

And is about as inflammatory and prone to resulting in aggravation, disappointment and general negativity as some of the more notorious four-letter words out there in the common lexicon.

I’ve spent the better part of a week this month at my dad’s old place in Virginia, my old home, cleaning it out, because as he’s no longer living there, the only logical thing to do would be to empty it out and get rid of it.  Of course, that isn’t going to happen on its own, and nobody in my family really seems as eager to not let a valuable asset potential degrade due to neglect as I am, so that has almost entirely fallen on my shoulders to do, despite the fact that I would rather have been doing a hundred other things than driving all the way up there just to clean and struggle to do my job remotely since that home hadn’t had internet access in the last two years.

I had the brilliant analogy that my dad was basically like Wall-E, in the sense that he seemed to collect an inordinate amount of useless and worthless trash and tchotchkes, but he was pretty good at organizing it and making it look fairly orderly within his own home.  However, when it comes to sorting and determining what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed, it became very, very quickly apparent that the load didn’t jive with the time available, and that pretty much everything needed to be trashed.

It was like an episode of Storage Wars where Dave Hester would always brag about the potential profitability about every single storage unit he won, but that’s because he had a consignment shop where all the bullshit he collected could sit on shelves and make a nickel five months later, as opposed to being moved immediately.  My dad had a lot of stuff that honestly could’ve made a few bucks here and there if time were on our side, but in the span of a week, I wasn’t about to try and organize a last second single home flea market for the legions of crap that my dad had hoarded over the last decade and a half.

Box full of optical mice?  Trash.  Bag full of brand-new commercial painting supplies?  Trash.  Boxes full of partially used duct and electrical tape?  Trash.  Box of tool grade rope?  Crate full of commercial paper towels?  Industrial tubs full of liquid soap?  Trash, trash, trash.

Amidst all the crap were all sorts of personal and family mementos too, stuff that my sister, my mom or myself didn’t take with us when we all inevitably moved out.  And as much as I tend to hesitate when it comes to disposing of anything of such nature, I walked into my week of work with a credo, to harden the heart and let shit go, because otherwise I would accomplish nothing.  If nobody cared about this stuff to take with them when they left, nobody is going to care about it when it’s tossed.

High school yearbooks, shop class projects, little pieces of crap that I may have saved at random points in my life, all part of the trash pile.  I had a moment of quiet shock, when my mom took her wedding photo album and tossed it into a box marked for disposal, but seeing as how they are divorced, it’s understandable, but still no less slightly mortifying as a child of said union.

When my work was done, the house was still in pretty much chaos, but at least it was fairly organized chaos.  Originally, I had planned on just being a repeated shuttle back and forth to the dump to dispose of everything that needed to go, but my aunt and my mom meddled and convinced me to pay for professional disposal.  Having a little experience with it, I knew to expect a bill north of a grand if we were going to go that route, but the thought of saving myself and my car the labor didn’t hurt, so that’s the choice I made, and I made some calls and reached out to a few companies, and landed with one who would come at a later date to come pick up all the trash.

Among all the crap, I had pulled aside some items that even I thought, would go quickly, if offered for free to the community, like some extension ladders, a television, and a weed-wacker.  Long story short, the ladders moved, but with resistance, and I ended up donating the television and the trimmer to Goodwill when neither generated a lick of interest.

Additionally, there were also a lot of furniture that I felt had some value in it, and I figured it shouldn’t be hard to leverage the Salvation Army to come pick up some free furniture that they could then flip at their consignment shops; yes, I’m aware of the general negative reputation the internet has over the SA, but I just wanted to get this house cleared in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, and in the past I’ve used them to help clear out my old house, and they seemed like a logical option.

After I had left, and the scheduled day of the SA pickup had passed, I called my mom whom I entrusted to be on site to let the SA guys in, and she told me that they took nothing.  They came into the home, examined all the marked items, deemed them not suitable quality, and refused to move anything that required traveling a flight of stairs.  I knew right away that it wasn’t so much that everything I offered was inadequate, as much as it was around 3:30 pm when they showed up to my place, their truck was probably full, the workers were tired, and they simply did not want to go through the labor of hauling off all the stuff I had asked them to.

So I basically got exactly what I had paid for – zero.

There’s the popular adage that people should never stop learning, and it was at this moment that I decided that I have fully learned an important lesson that I will try to implement into my remaining life, and that free, is bullshit, and to look at anything in life that claims to be free, with the skepticism that I would look at anyone proclaiming to be a Nigerian prince.

Free, always sounds awesome, but free comes with a whole slew of conditionals that are mitigated when there’s some form of transactional currency.  And the drawback to free always seems to be at the extreme risk of something often times more valuable than any form of currency, which is time, because with the case of the Salvation Army, their refusal to do their job because their service was free, still cost me a great deal of time, as I did not have a fallback plan, because they did me right in my own previous experience, which was a fallacy in its own right that I need to be mindful of in the future as well.

But I think about all the times in my life where something has been free, whether it’s been me trying to get something, or me trying to give shit away, and almost all of the instances, have involved aggravation, regret, and questioning why I did in the first place.

It’s like the IHOP fallacy, whenever they do like their free pancake day or whatever, you see on the news people who wait hours for a free short stack of pancakes, when that same short stack would’ve cost like $7 and get it immediately if you paid for it, making those who think about it realize that paying > free.

I’ve gone through great lengths in the past to get free bobbleheads at ballparks, and looking back at all those instances, I can count on one hand where it’s actually been worth it, and I actually applaud myself in any instance where I may have self-policed my time versus free scale and altered my choices in the past.

I also think about the sheer aggravation of trying to give stuff away on stuff like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, because it seems like something that should be layups, but the flake rate for free shit is so astronomically high, so often times I just end up throwing perfectly good shit away, because I simply grew exasperated with trying to not be wasteful and giving away perfectly good goods, because I’m just tired of people.

The point of all this is that I have, I truly have, learned, that the word free is not necessarily a good word anymore, and is instead a loaded word, full of conditionals and rules and invisible clauses, that one really needs to understand the risks when they inevitably grow tempted by it, solely because of the potential end result of a transaction with nothing exchanged.

So many times in life, it’s simply better to just grow up, pay up, and get shit done, without any of the bullshit that free entails.

The subtle aggression of emoji skin tones

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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Every workplace’s text client communication vibe is different.  I’ve been places where there are a ton of old motherfuckers around, so there’s basically no text internal communication client at all, and even if there is one, nobody uses it, and those who do are pariahs and are looked at like moon people for even daring to consider internal text client communication as official business correspondence.

Conversely, I’ve also been to places that ran Slack, which means there are like 76 different channels of groups, communities, and teams, and every single message is responded to in 164 different gifs and emojis, and Slack communication is interpreted as official business, and there are major businesses decisions that are locked in via the client.

Where I’m at these days is kind of midway point between the two, where we run Microsoft Teams as our official client.  There are plenty of technologically inept olds still in the company that by virtue of either refusing, or are just too old to figure out how to use the client, simply don’t.  But I’m fortunate to my department having a lot more technologically savvy users who have no issues using the client, and it’s what we use on the regular to communicate, in and out of the office.

The majority of the etiquette here are users using the default emojis to acknowledge or recognize appreciation, mostly the standard yellow thumbs up, and heart, and if something is funny, then the laughing face emoji.

However recently, I’ve noticed a little shift in some user behavior that kind of has me thinking some things.  At first, it started with some remarks in some group threads, where the responses aren’t just getting thumbs up’ped, but they’re being thumbs up’ped with both the regular default yellow thumbs up, as well as the black skin tone thumbs up.

Obviously, in spite of my general appreciation of dark humor, I have no issue with black people representing and busting out black skin tone thumbs up emojis.  It’s just that I couldn’t help but notice that after these started getting used, it didn’t take long before I noticed that later on, when there was another comment that warranted mass acknowledgement, I would see that in addition to the black skin thumbs ups, there were now users responding with white people thumbs ups.

The thing for me is that I have no qualms with the white folks doing this, it’s just that in my observations, this was behavior that was not done until the emergence of black skin thumbs up emojis.  Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m likely overthinking things, but there’s something that seems subtly passive aggressive with a hint of racism about the act, as if some of my white colleagues were kind of triggered or offended that some of our black colleagues decided to start utilizing black thumbs up emojis, so they decided to respond with white ones.

And then we have comments that look like the above, where there’s a mish-mash of colored emojis in response to an inconsequential remark in the grand spectrum of a work day.

What if I felt the need to jump in on this racial representation?  You know who doesn’t get considered in the great expansion of emoji skin tones?  That’s right, Asian folks.  There are skin tones to account for white people, black people, and numerous shades of brown to cover Hispanics, Middle Eastern, Indian, or anyone whose skin tone is remotely in the spectrum. 

But Asian people?  No dice there.  No light skin tones with a hint of warmth to encapsulate Asians, and maybe some people from like Southeast Asia, the Pacific Island, or regions of Korea and Japan where there are lot more rural folks with tanned skin could get away with using some of the brown-tone emojis, but the fact of the matter is that there is no real set of emojis that takes into consideration Asian skin tones.

Obviously, the generic yellow thumbs up is not sufficient for Asian folks, because we are not fucking Simpsons characters, and have tones that look that yellow.

Needless to say, I’m leaning in a direction where I wish all skin tones would just be eliminated, and we’re left with just the standardized Simpsons yellow emoji.  Take race out of the equation, and eliminate any possibility for such subtle passive aggression.  I know all the people utilizing these non-standard emojis and I don’t think they’re trying to be racist, but to me, it kind of comes off that way, especially since racist-ass Microsoft’s emoji catalog doesn’t account for Asians, and if I wanted to jump aboard the representation train, I can’t.

I can’t even begin to express how pathetic this notion is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whilst doomscrolling earlier in the day, I came across this ad for some app/community that was targeting couples with no kids who seem to be exasperated with the idea that they’ve been marginalized and feel the need to require the crutch of a specifically curated app/community to meet other couples with no kids for platonic friendships and relationships.

I stared at my screen for a few seconds, and if my eyes could roll further back, they might accidentally connect with my sinuses and then accidentally roll into the back of my throat, I’d accidentally swallow them, and I’d be blind for the rest of my life.

As the kids would say, (get) the fuck outta here

There are actually couples without kids out there that feel that they are the ones who feel marginalized?  They’re the ones who feel the societal shift because they didn’t want to have children?  They feel like their circles alienate them because they don’t have kids?

Have these self-absorbed twats been paying attention to the news?  Remotely even heard about the rapidly falling birth rates?  Women who feel empowered to shut the gate toward the continuous survival of the human race until shithead men get their act together?  Most Asian countries on an eventual timeline of extinction, because their birth rates have fallen faster than anywhere else?

Like, the way it works is that the more these birth rates fall, and if they were to continue, the human population, as overpopulated as shit is now, eventually does swing in the opposite direction, and sure it would be quite some time from today, but would eventually be on a timeline towards extinction, if none of the societal problems of the world don’t wipe us all out first.

But it’s all summed up with me looking at this ad and service and thinking, are you fucking kidding me?

I think the testimonials are what set me off the worst, people whining about how they’re feeling like pariahs because they don’t have kids, and how hard it is to meet other couples and people.  I’m like, mother fuckers, if the shoes were on the other feet, and you’re the ones with kids, and realizing just how much of your general social life much less life’s aspirations you have to put on hold in the name of being somewhat decent parents, maybe, just maybe you’d understand just how tone deaf and asinine such a service is.

To a parent like me, hearing about a service/app like this is like millionaires who developed an app to help them find more money.  I have zero regrets about choosing to become parents, but I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t see my childless friends and not be astounded by the freedom, flexibility and general ability to do whatever the fuck they want that I don’t always think they seem to realize they might be taking for granted.

Couples without kids have a degree of freedom that parents will not have for a very, very long time, at least not without the sacrifice of time spent with their children.  Them complaining about how hard it is to meet other couples, to me is like, they simply have forgotten how to open their fucking door and step outside, because I can assure these flakes that it’s a whole lot harder to meet couples with kids in tow, than it is without, because our offspring are wild variables completely incapable of controlling.

These out of touch headfucks seem to think that parents meeting parents is such an automatic-in with making friends, but just because our kids get along doesn’t mean the parents will.  It helps a little bit, but in the six years I’ve been raising two kids, I can comfortably say that we can probably count on one hand of the parents we actually like, and even still, we’ve never had any sort of meal, play date or social gathering with them at all.

I will concede that meeting people in this day and age is harder than it’s ever been, due to a variety of factors, be it societal, the stark divides between various socioeconomic, idealistic, classist factors, COVID did a number on peoples’ social skills, and the fact that millennials and on have all been raised by the internet and people just don’t know how to interact with each other.

But for couples with no kids to complain about how hard it is to meet other couples with no kids, is tone deaf on a monumental degree, and these cocksuckers have no idea just how easy they have it.  Them not being able to have spontaneity, flexibility or meaningful relationships isn’t a problem with all couples with no kids, it’s exclusively just them.  Trying to make it an umbrella issue, might unearth a good bit of like-minded couples, but really, it’s just revealing a whole lot of lazy, untalented, uncharismatic assholes out there.

Nobody is more impressed with mediocrity than me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A day ago, I got my renewed passport in the mail.  I was very impressed at the turnaround on this, seeing as how I had applied for it a mere two weeks prior.  I’d been sitting on an email reminder to renew my passport from several months ago, but mythical wife and I had been kicking the idea around to go abroad for a vacation sometime within the next year, and the last thing I wanted was to have a passport on the cusp of expiration, and it causing all sorts of preventable complication later down the line.

A little over a year ago, I applied and received passports for both of my kids, and much like my own initial passport from eons ago, it was quite the nerve-wracking process of making sure I had birth certificates, proofs of residence, clothes, boots, motorcycle, etc.  In fact, when I got my very first one, I had to actually go into Washington DC to the passport office due to some reason I can’t remember, and even that was for a temporary, one-year only passport, all so I could go to fucking Toronto, of all places.

Either way, passports for my kids was like a turnaround of four months, and I’m proud of myself for having the wherewithal to have started as early as I did, so that they would be done for the cruise that we went on just months after receiving them.

When I expressed to my friends at how pleased I was that I got my renewed passport in just two weeks, like most of the shit I say to the group chat with most of my friends, it was met with silence, and then eventually some of my wiser guys blurting out that it’s not impressive since renewals are usually faster than getting brand new passports.

Yes, that may be the case, as I recall my last renewal taking maybe 6-8 weeks, but this was fucking two.  Even the passport office dot gov website had predicted a turnaround of like, end of March, which would still be more than sufficient to my potential summer needs, but then I started getting status update emails that already had tracking numbers and an expected delivery date of February 20.

I made a joke to my friends that we could all agree that just about everything in Washington is a putrid wasteland of process, corruption and bullshit, but whatever’s going on at Passport Services, I had just gotten a renewal done and delivered in just two weeks.  But like I said, crickets.

What I’m getting at is that it’s apparent that there’s nobody in the world more impressed with mediocrity than me.  I’m so nihilistic, so jaded, and so pessimistic about the state of America and the rest of the world, that when people in the world simply perform to their baseline job descriptions, I’m fucking over the moon.

Yeah, I know that my generally droll outlook isn’t necessarily the best looking or something to be proud of, but I can’t help it.  I get so disappointed when people fail to meet my expectations, the only seemingly adequate defense mechanism to adopt is to assume utter incompetence across the board, to where when people deliver mediocrity, my mind is blown away and it brings me great joy that there are occasionally competent people in the world.

And anyone who actually does go above and beyond for me, well, I had Yelp Elite status for like the better part of eight years because I was ready and willing to review a million stars to any businesses that impressed me with such.

Needless to say, while my friends might not be impressed with a two-week turnaround for a passport renewal, I was quite elated and impressed by it.  Maybe some robots have taken over working at Passport Services, because everything else in Washington DC is steaming hot bullshit, and I can’t imagine any possible other alternative to a task being done so exceptionally, than if it were done by artificial intelligence.

Viral is mixing shit in a rotisserie chicken bag and making it look like vomit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I mean I don’t know much more succinct I can be about what this post is about.  Perhaps because I like food so much, for whatever reason, the algorithm has seen fit to keep feeding me all these variants of these idiot influencers who are all trying the supposed viral Costco rotisserie chicken bag ‘hack,’ where they chop up a chicken and mix a whole lot of things inside the chicken’s bag itself and call it any form of a palatable meal.

The idea of some of the concoctions seem like they could be good, but the fact that a lot of these dumbasses are insistent and execute them within the confines of a plastic bag, there’s no avoiding that the end result of every single recipe and variant makes it look like people are vomiting into these bags and squirting sriracha and/or kewpie mayonnaise onto them and imbibing on them and overselling how good they are, as if they’re eating Five Guys for the very first time in their life.

Back in my day, doing what these kids are doing now and calling it viral, of mixing a bunch of shit in a bag and eating it straight from there, would be called along the lines of prison food, or walking tacos, with the general perception that comes along with names like those attached to them.  But because the internet continues to make people dumber than they were a day prior, we have a thousand variants of people trying to do this and pyramid piggybacking on a bad idea, for the sake of some cheap views.

The bottom line is that I haven’t seen a single version of this so-called viral rotisserie chicken bag trend that looks remotely appetizing.  Sure, I know taste and satisfaction is supremely more important than aesthetics, but there’s still a minimum viable appearance necessary to make the eater not believe that they’re eating vomit straight out of a bag.

I know I’m occasionally susceptible to wanting to try out a trend, but as far as the viral Costco rotisserie chicken bag ‘hack,’ yeah no, I think I’m good on not wanting to eat food that looks like it’s passed through a digestive track before ending back up inside a bag.

I guess OnlyFans wasn’t as lucrative as she had hoped

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s a lot of turnover in the professional wrestling industry.  Budget cuts on account of oversaturation, poor television ratings, general societal changes where the industry just isn’t as hot as it once was, etcetera, etcetera.  However, I have this belief in wrestling that even if a talent is released, they are always one idea and a phone call away from being brought back into the business.  Over the years, we the fans have witnessed such revivals countless times, and as long as a released talent doesn’t go out of their way to scorch earth and set fire to any bridges they used, there’s always the possibility that they will be back, and hopefully to more success in the future.

Well, when the WWE released Cora Jade, she didn’t take it particularly well.  From the moment she was released, she was up on social media taking shots at the company, vaguebooking over some of the colleagues and personnel she wasn’t a fan of, and after the initial shock and resentment period that most people whom might have been fired from their jobs might harbor, Cora Jade didn’t really stop.  Seemingly at times, she would go out of her way, or inject herself into debates and discussions about the business in order to keep taking digs at the WWE, and how she didn’t need them, and how her future endeavors would definitely be more lucrative or make her more famous and in demand than if she had remained a WWE superstar.

Needless to say, it’s apparent that nobody in her personal life had ever told her the importance of not burning bridges, and that there is definitely a time and place for popping off, but it’s really generally not wise most of the time.

Regardless, with her bridge particularly singed, she embarked on an endeavor that would mostly ensure her being able to generate income utilizing one of her more prominent wrestling attributes: her body, and starting up an OnlyFans account.

Of course, she went way out of her way to put over OnlyFans while still taking digs at the WWE, as if she were trying to convince herself on top of all of her social followers that OnlyFans wasn’t something to be ashamed about.  Unsurprisingly, she seemed to be shot out of a cannon when she started, because of course she was quick to boast about her earnings by making a post about the luxury car that she was now capable of affording.

I mean, Toni Storm and Jordynne Grace both made gobs of money when they were on the platform, however, neither of them were shitting on the business while they were doing it, they were just capitalizing on a money-making venture while they awaited their next opportunity, which inevitably came, since the two of them were way better wrestlers than Cora Jade was, and they actually had something to offer their respective companies.

So honestly, it was a little surprising to see Cora Jade emerge back in TNA, under her old name, Elayna Black.  She had made such a big deal about how much she was over the professional wrestling industry, that even if she really didn’t want to step away, many in the business might be turned off by her general lack of appreciation for the industry, but here we are anyway.

The funny thing is that over the last few months before the return of Black, I actually hadn’t heard much from her, as far as the algorithm went at feeding me content.  And considering that she came crawling back to the industry that she said she didn’t need anymore, it leads me to believe that perhaps the OnlyFans train wasn’t doing as well as she had thought it was going to do, and that perhaps it might not be a bad idea to remain in the pro-wrestling space.

Either way, it must kind of suck to be Elayna Black/Cora Jade.  She had a great big Gen-Z crashout after she lost her job, and made herself look like an idiot with all of her bridge burning on social media.  Relegated herself to selling risque pictures of herself to creeps, but when that well seemingly began to dry up, she came crawling back to the business she had spent the last year trying to bury.

Owned.

Dad Brog (#160): overstimulated is another way to say burnt [the fuck] out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

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George Carlin once did a routine where he talked about how society has a tendency to try to rename harsh things to sound less severe and more generally acceptable to society.  His primary example was how the term shell shock was renamed to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Shell shock was at some point deemed to be too shocking for sensitive people to hear, and therefore PTSD came into vernacular, and yes it probably helped at making it slightly less scary to talk about, I get this impression that PTSD itself is climbing to that stature where shell shock was, and soon we’ll probably get another, softer, replacement term to replace it but I’m straying off topic here.

Whenever I get into one of my moods where all I see is red, I’m mad at the world, I hate everything and everyone and want nothing more than to be able to stop time all around me and take a deep breath and relax in complete isolation, like that movie from 20 years ago (Cashback), the only phrase that comes into my mind is: burnt [the fuck] out.  Everything pisses me off, just about nothing is capable of bringing me back, and the only thing that comes close to helping is going to sleep and hoping it’s not still around when I wake up.

Over the last few years, I’ve been spoon-fed a whole lot of content that definitely caters to the fact that I am married with children, and I’ve noticed that in that time, a phrase I’ve seen a lot of, is overstimulated.  Most of the time it pertains to all the mommy content creators who really love to declare themselves or hypothetical stressed out other mommies as being overstimulated, but because I can relate to overstimulated mommies way more than I’d like to admit to, I get it.  However, I also recognize that most of the time, the symptoms of a mom that’s overstimulated it is, seeing red, being mad at the world, hating everything and everyone, and probably wanting nothing more than to be able to stop time all around them and take a deep breath and relax in complete isolation like that movie from 20 years ago (Cashback).

It occurred to me that what’s probably happened over the last few years is that the phrase “burnt [the fuck] out” has been used so much and so hard, and that peoples’ eyes have begun glazing over upon hearing it, is that society has basically invented a replacement term for it, in order for it to get people to listen and be curious and think about it, and that term is obviously, overstimulated.

It sounds less harsh than burnt [the fuck] out, and because there’s no optional profanity to attach to it (inherently), it’s like there’s a ceiling to how piercing it can be used with some venom behind it.  Overstimulated, is a gentler and less severe word on the auditory senses of weak people, but I think I’ve unlocked the bullshit spin behind the word, and refuse to see the phrase for something other than what it really is, a descriptor for people who are feeling burnt [the fuck] out.

But it’s good that I’ve realized the truth behind it the bullshit.  It gives my own personal vernacular a softer and less scary option to use if I feel like I’m speaking with some particularly pussy people, and surmise that telling them that I’m burnt [the fuck] out won’t scare them off entirely.

Hopefully the next time I write a dad brog, it won’t be about some overstimulated subject matter.