Tag: wordpress

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.

Feebly attempting to play catch up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a minute since I last took some time to write.  Long past the period of time where I begin to get anxious because I haven’t written anything in a while, and to a point where I start to get dangerously apathetic about doing it at all.  The problem, as I’ve alluded to numerous times is that I’m a peculiar personality that really likes to have so many conditions met before I find it possibly adequate time to write, and pretty much all month, they just haven’t been met.

Most obviously, the time factor.  It’s not like this is going to devolve into an angsty dad brog where I make all sorts of poorly veiled remarks about how hard parenting under my circumstances are, because frankly the girls haven’t really been much of an issue other than the fact that one or both of them seem to pick up some rando sickness every single month this year.  But they’re eating well, sleeping is improving, and those are the key things at this stage of life, and I can’t say that I’m having so many ragey emotions at how overworked I am on account of the difficulty of parenting.

No, it’s just that I haven’t have any adequate time to do any writing.  I get up, feed the girls breakfast, go to work; if I’m at the office, I actually get a good amount of shit done, and I get to hit the gym on most of those days which elevates my feeling of well-being.  Or if I’m working from home, my days kind of wrap up sooner, and regardless of which, I go right into the fires of the chaos of a toddler and infant until it’s dinner time, bath time and then bed time for them.

But by the time they’re down it’s usually 8 pm-ish, and if mythical wife and I haven’t eaten yet, then it’s a mad dash to get something to eat because we’re probably starving and we don’t want to cook and every food option is close to closing since we’re out in the burbs.

Then comes the nightly reset which somehow I’m the only person who does any of it, which takes about another hour or so of cleaning, straightening, cleaning and filling bottles and just getting everything ready to get used up and torn up the next day.

Sometimes I have work I need to catch up on, and on my work-from-home days, I mandate treadmill runs to compensate for not going to a gym, to which yes, is an activity that would classify as a me-activity, but I treat exercise like a job in itself, so often times I don’t want to run, which is exactly why it is that I have to.

And then the clock is at the point where I don’t feel like I have adequate time to write something before I need to get to bed so that I’m not completely dead the following day.  I get angsty about this, and instead of starting and stopping something in text, I usually just end up playing Fire Emblem Heroes on my phone or doing surveys or waiting for the next day’s Wordle to queue up before going to bed feeling like I’ve accomplished nothing for myself.

But TL;DR, I’m finally at a point where I feel the compulsion to write about something, but also feeling like that because I haven’t written anything in so long that this pile of word vomit needed to be stated first before I can actually get to the gradually growing list of topics and things that I’ve earmarked as having to want to write about, and hope I can mentally get back into the right places to where I can.

Otherwise, kids are good, job is going fine, my health has been a bit wonky since I hit 40, and I’m sure I’ll delve into it more in depth if/when things straighten up, but I’m still able to workout and run.  It’s just the same old song and dance, with probably less angst than when my second kid was younger and still working out her sleep issues.  Went to Savannah for a brief spell, for a wedding of a former co-worker, which was quite pleasant, so that’s where the image above comes from, where I sacrificed sleeping in when I could, because I really wanted to jog along River Street while we were staying right on it.  Priorities.

How things can change over the span of a decade

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Throughout my 82-day journey of re-posting literally ten years’ worth of brog posts, I naturally took the time to go down memory lane and re-read everything I’d written over that time.  I think as a whole, the collective brog does paint a decent picture of who I really am, but I’ll also be the first person to admit that hoo-boy, there’s some shit I’ve written in the past that most certainly isn’t the way I think these days.

Inherently, I don’t think people are capable of dramatic change in their lives, but I think it’s fair game to say that opinions most certainly can change throughout time.  Environment, influence, and/or just plain growing up, the way people think can harden or soften, or just plain go in different directions as time passes.

I don’t want to one of those people whom when they get become rich, famous and have the spotlight of the internet shone on them (because that’s totally going to happen to me one day), and have their internet history drug out of the past and screen shots slapped onto Twitter for the world to ridicule and judge, I went ahead and took the liberty to drag out some of the more notable changes that I’d witnessed about myself throughout the last ten years, and regardless of how wince-worthy and regrettable some of the things I’ve written may have been, the fact of the matter is that these are things that I’d thought, ways that my mind worked, and feelings that I felt at those specific instances, and I own the things I’ve said.

Because as much as some of the more regrettable things I’ve written might make me, much less anyone else, wince, cringe or face palm, I do think the revisionist history culture of 2020 is way worse.

Alternatively, this post probably should’ve just been titled “content that did not age well”

Continue reading “How things can change over the span of a decade” →

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.

General brogging

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The formula for my writing over the last few years is that typically I find a particular topic that piques my interest or inspires words to formulate, and then I write as much as I can about it, and vomit it up onto the brog.  I’ve tried not to write for the sake of just writing, but on a day like today, I’m also thinking that there’s a little bit of value in such an exercise as well.

Basically, I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic lately, and I think it was spurred on by an old picture I came across while perusing through some old folders on my hard drive(s).  A picture led to a corresponding brog post back from the pre-WordPress days, and naturally it led to that awkward feeling of looking in the past to see how much style has changed from past to present.  Undoubtedly, back then, I wrote in more of a diary style that captured more of the mundane and daily living, and I could probably say that I wrote more for the sake of writing back then, then I did with a particular topic or goal in mind.

Sure, that means that anyone who read any of that kind of stuff, it would be safe to say that they might have an interest in my life in general, but for an outsider, or someone who doesn’t know me well, or at all, it’s something that’s definitely not worth reading.  However, that style of word slop was often times better at conveying my emotions, moods and feelings, because frankly I was more blunt and obvious with such things when writing about shit like going faster than another car, or my anal-retentive Uncle Tom of a superior at that current job.

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Your attention please

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With the month of March coming to a close, I just wanted to take a moment to go ahead and pat myself on the back, for a month of exemplary brogging.  And by “exemplary,” I really mean “frequent,” but I just wanted to use the word exemplary, because it sounds so much more prestigious and accomplishing.

And really, I do feel sort of accomplished, because if there’s one neat-o thing about WordPress is that it keeps a running count of the number of posts I make each month.  Turns out that through March, I made more posts than there were days in the month; and March is one of those months with thirty-one days, so it’s not like I’m bragging about February or anything.

Continue reading “Your attention please” →