Hello, I pledged allegiance to the flag, but stuff still happened.
So what's up? It has been a heck of a year, and now we're at the end of it.
The 2024th one. There's been probably some more than that, but yo, a lot happened this year.
Let's talk about it. January!
Substack got into a beef with everyone because they refused to de-platform Nazi.
An airplane door blew off mid-flight. Real cool.
A 13-year-old beat Tetris. The Epstein documents actually released.
That happened. I got COVID in January, too.
Elon banned a whole bunch of journalists who were critical of him from Twitter.
The free speech haven.
Voice actors in the gaming industry were blindsided with a new industry contract that
allowed for a lot of AI usage they were not okay with.
A study looked into the effects of the male gaze on women as they are performing
things, tasks, and such. And it turns out they were largely unaffected.
But annoyed, Joe Biden confirmed that if given the power to shut down the border,
he would do it.
February! TikTok tried to compete with YouTube in long-form content and was like,
hey, everybody, just turn your phones to the side. We're going to start pushing
long-form horizontal video. You know.
Universal media pulled their streaming licenses from TikTok, silencing myriad videos.
Anti-trans policymaking took off like wildfire across several states, just passing anti-trans
laws for the fun of it. Congress invited a whole bunch of social media CEOs to come testify
about how bad they are with kids.
Farmers in Europe from France to Italy broke out in protest over very strict new regulations
that basically gave them no room to work financially.
Despite not being at war, the US dropped hundreds of bombs in Iraq and Syria after
three US service members were killed by a drone strike from Iran in Syria.
Disney invested $1.5 billion into Epic Games to get a, like, stakeholder shit.
John Federman began really leaning into his heel turn against the progressives that put
him into office, siding real hard with Israel and basically telling progressives to shut the
fuck up. Taylor Swift joined the ranks of Elon Musk, who would later offer to give her a baby.
In suing a person who was publishing her already public flight data to Twitter,
an abandoned half-built tower in LA got graffiti bombed, and the LAPD called it a worldwide issue.
The Apple Vision Pro released.
Biden's mental acuity finally made it into the mainstream media discussion talking point stuff.
Because, obviously, Israel dropped all pretents of not attacking Rafe and just started to bombard
Rafe, a zone previously designated for refugees.
An abandoned ocean vessel that no one knew who the owner was off the coast of Trinidad
began leaking oil into the ocean. Was that yours?
Congress passed a $100 billion funding bill for wars in Ukraine and Israel,
and Republicans were mad that they couldn't send more money.
Despite a police presence of 800 cops, there was a mass shooting in Kansas City during a
Super Bowl celebration parade. Air Canada deployed an AI customer support agent,
which started just making up policies about returns, and it landed them in court.
Reddit sold all of their content to train AIs.
For $60 million. That's nothing.
Alexei Navalny, a notable Russian opposition figure, died in prison after being imprisoned
for being an opposition leader. Medical research discovered that long COVID brain fog is indeed
very real and is caused by the thinning of, like, artery walls in your brain.
It's not good. Don't get COVID.
Alabama's Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF treatment are considered children.
This sent shock waves through the medical community because, obviously, that's insane.
This is an ongoing issue. There was, like, a temporary stay to help some operations continue,
and now there's efforts being done to amend their state's constitution to overturn this
absolutely absurd ruling. Mitch McConnell announced that he would not seek another term
as the leader of Republicans in the Senate. This is because he's only alive by Technicalit.
I launched my merch store, merchfrom.dev. March! Holy God, we're only in March.
A study released from the UK found that there are virtually no downsides to having a four-day
work week. On a podcast, the Florida Surgeon General said that COVID vaccines are severing
our connection to God. RFK, in an attempt to desperately try and pretend he's not vehemently
anti-vax, launched an AI support agent, of course, on his website for his political campaign.
The AI proceeded to say, yes, no, he is very much anti-vax. Let me explain why.
A group of Israeli soldiers took just a real cute selfie in front of all the destruction
and rubble in Gaza. Roosterteeth shut down. After the State of the Union, the Republicans decided
that their response would be from Senator Katie Britt, who gave a very strange monologue in her
kitchen. The TikTok ban sprung into full force, not being passed quite yet, but the rhetoric
began in true. I-F-R-O-L. Facebook was sued for Project Ghostbusters, which was a project to get
people to use their VPN so they could spy on everything you did in every app outside of Facebook.
They were upset that they couldn't track you once you left their apps and went to, say, Snapchat,
hence, Ghostbusters. But we should ban TikTok, obviously. A nine-year-old boy led cops on a
car chase when he tried to drive himself to school, and he almost made it. When eclipse happened,
in the sky. McDonald's started making some moves after the McDonald's in Israel were supporting
Israel's army in assaulting Gaza, and people were like, what the fuck? So corporate McDonald's was
like, we're gonna buy back all of these franchises because, mm-hmm, RPR, Discord, by accident,
broke YouTube's 24-hour view count record. It was an April Fool's announcement video that
played for everyone, and when you dismissed it, it just kept playing on loop in the background on
silence. So everyone who had Discord was looping the same video all day. The humane AI pin came out,
and it was horrendously bad. So bad that it started a pretty cynical conversation about
if tech reviewers have too much power because they can kill companies. Not, maybe we shouldn't
make terrible products. Google fired several employees who were protesting Google's contracts
with the Israeli government. Everyone forgot about the Apple Vision Pro. Amazon's ring cameras were
found to have been allowing unauthorized access to video feeds, and they were forced by the FTC
to give $5.6 million in refund. John Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower, was found dead, and Biden
signed the TikTok ban bill. May! Right on the heels of the humane AI pin fiasco, we got the Rabbit R1,
which was somehow worse. A second Boeing whistleblower died after suddenly becoming mysteriously
ill, despite being very healthy. Ceasefire talks continuously fell through with Israel as Netanyahu
maintained that the only path forward was the complete destruction of Gaza. Data published
by The New York Times showed that for the first time in history, billionaires were paying a lower
effective tax rate than the working class. That's right, you pay more taxes per dollar
than the billionaires do. A cop murdered a 23-year-old Air Force member who was sitting in his home.
After the cop went to the wrong hall, they banged on the door. He reasonably got his legally-owned
firearm, and they were like, ah, he's black and has a gun! The president of Iran and a bunch of his
closest allies died in a helicopter crash. Dorothy Jean Tillman II became the youngest person to get
a doctorate in her field at the age of 17, studying a particular kind of medical research that I
don't understand. Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned a literal convicted murderer who murdered
a protester at a BLM protest. This isn't like hyperbole, he was found guilty and convicted by
a jury of his peers of murder. But I guess if you kill a person who supports black lives,
that's pardonable, as opposed to terrorism if it's a CEO. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito
threw his wife under the bus after it came out that they were flying an upside-down American
flag above their house during the whole Stop the Steel fiasco. It was like obviously signalling
support for Trump, which is your Supreme Court Justice at least fake that you're impartial.
Or actually, I guess that that's just not important anymore, never mind.
Carry on, Samuel Alito. Carlo Acutis became the first millennial to achieve sainthood.
Belle Delphine announced that the whole Gamer Girl bathwater thing, she actually lost money on that
due to shenanigans from PayPal. Paper Mario, the thousand-year door, was remade for Nintendo
Switch, and you should play it. That game is a 10 out of 10. Gio! Switching hands. We got a
switch it off. This is a long one. A cattle farmer in Colorado was struck by a bolt of lightning,
killing him and dozens of his cattle in the middle of a field when there really wasn't a
storm going on or anything. Tiktok began their full scramble in earnest as the Tiktok bill began
to get set into motion. Ceasefire talks continued to fall through with Israel, as Israel continued
to say Gaza must be destroyed. OpenAI announced that Israel and Russia were using chat GPT to
generate mass quantities of propaganda in multiple languages. Absolutely flooring virtually every
security researcher, Microsoft announced their Recall feature, which takes screenshots of everything
you do on your computer and saves them forever. Elon Musk was rejected a $50 billion pay package
for the first time. He wasn't happy. After the International Criminal Court started to suggest
that Netanyahu is committing war crimes, the U.S. House of Representatives sanctioned the
International Criminal Court. You gotta love being on the right side of history. The investigation
into the Ocean Gate tightens submersible that imploded with the billionaires on board, that
moved forward and the details just made it just that much worse. Worse, worse is a relative term.
The Wall Street Journal released a huge report where they interviewed dozens of women who were
abused and groomed by Elon Musk across a bunch of his companies. You know, the guy who's the
richest man in the world and essentially now has control over the entire ruling party of America?
Yeah, that one. Hunter Biden was found guilty of possessing firearms while having narcotics.
Daddy Joe said he would not pardon Hunter. This is foreshadowing. Del tried to tell their workforce
to get back to the office and their workforce, half of them, were like, nah, you could shove it.
Unrest boiled over in New Caledonia as France is continuing to lose their grip on the indigenous
population who is not very happy about the whole colonization thing. TikTok and several
creators sued the US government over the TikTok ban bill as the US population only has 30% support
for the bill. Some scientists emerged from a year long mission in a simulated Mars environment.
So they got to just not be here for a year, which is, I mean, sign me up. And for the last thing
for June, Biden took this stage with Trump in what would ultimately become one of the most
horrible and consequential presidential debate performances in history. July. We're gonna have
to pick up the pace, y'all. People got so sick of AI that even Goldman Sachs put out a report
saying, Hey, y'all, the investment is just not worth it. When are we getting some returns?
Boeing pled guilty to criminal fraud over their whole like everything. A giant Poseidon statue
kind of appeared in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean, someone put it there. Probably Joe Biden dropped
out of the 2024 presidential race after everyone was like, dog, what are you doing? He previously
stated that he wouldn't run for a second term. The US Supreme Court ruled that presidents have,
quote, absolute immunity in, quote, official acts. HR company, the lattice attempted to roll out a
change where they would list AI agents in the same places as human workers in org charts.
They rolled that back. We got really great news from HIV drug research and may have discovered a
new much less invasive prep drug. Elon Musk threw his full support behind Trump around this time
where he started to make like MAGA specific hashtag stuff on Twitter and started just being
very, very loudly pro Trump hundreds of employees across several sectors in Bethesda game studios
successfully unionized. And we had the assassination attempt of Donald Trump.
How do you miss August? A background check company called National Public Data suffered a
data breach affecting 2.9 billion people. Mr. Beats controversy around the whole beast game stuff
and child grooming and everything that this is around the time that all that started to pick
up. A woman got arrested at an Applebee's for trying to game the system with regards to an
all you can eat deal. So if you ever thought about trying to do that, we have the answer now.
Fuck the police. I want my food. Tenacious D kind of broke up after Kyle Gass made a joke
about Trump's assassination attempt on stage and then Jack Black had to distance himself from that.
And then everyone was upset. And apparently now they're not breaking up. I don't know. That was
dumb. Like we're all out here making jokes about Luigi Mangione killing the CEO guy like a joke
about an assassination attempt that didn't work. Like, come on. I'm so tired of all these pearls
that were clutching in video was caught very obviously trying to hide their attempts to scrape
data from YouTube to train their AIs. They were literally telling their employees to use nefarious
practices to try to hide the fact that these requests to get these videos were coming from
Nvidia's data centers. The bombardment of Gaza continued thanks to Israel and the United States
of America as the death toll rose to somewhere between the official tally of about 40,000
some odd souls to the third party estimations in the hundreds of thousands of lost souls.
Google released a feature for their photos app called reimagine, which lets you use AI to take
a picture and reimagine it with different contents such as drugs next to somebody you don't like.
RFK dropped out of the 2024 presidential race joining Trump's team and ultimately seeking a
position in the head of the government around health stuff. Oh no. 70 previously unpublished
works of poetry by JRR Tolkien were published and the founder of Telegram was arrested in France
for... we'll get to that. Do you remember? Something something September. I don't know
the song. A little stereo outbreak though from Boar's head. Australia joined several other
countries that actually have laws that make sense sometimes in passing a right to disconnect law,
which basically says that if you are off the clock you are not responsible for like checking your
email. Officials in Texas noted an uptick in sausage purchases, which apparently is an
indicator of a downturn in the economy. After arresting the Telegram CEO, France charged him
with money laundering and aiding the distribution of child sexual exploitation material. Cool.
He then was like, uh, we're not gonna... we're not gonna capitulate and then they capitulated
and now they're actually moderating Telegram. A Wells Fargo employee was found dead at her cubicle
four days after having clocked in to work. Work less hard. Brazil entirely blocked Twitter after
Musk refused to comply with local policies and that ultimately fueled a pretty mass exodus to
Blue Sky. Follow me on Blue Sky. The US Department of Justice revealed that Tenant Media, a right-wing
media organization that was pushing a lot of the usual suspects in that general space, turns out,
yeah, they were a Russian operation. They were being funded by Russia. So, you know, weird.
Oregon saw a measles outbreak among their children due to catastrophically low vaccination rates.
OpenAI complained that if they had to follow the law, they wouldn't be able to operate.
Which is weird. Because if I complain about that, I just go to jail.
Massive protests broke out in France after a deeply unpopular Prime Minister appointment
after a deeply contentious race. A man in North Carolina generated about 10 million dollars
using AI to create fake songs and then using AI's to stream those fake songs across various
streaming platforms. At that point, let him keep the money. JD Vance and Donald Trump both began
talking about the whole Haitian migrants eating pets thing. Facebook began to use the data of all
adult Australian users to train their AI's with no option to opt out because they're
happened to not be a law on the books in that region requiring an opt out. A massive suite of
security flaws were found in the dating app Field, ranging from being able to read other
people's messages to being able to send a message to anyone as anyone. We got a look at the new USPS
mail trucks and they're adorable. Israel detonated a whole bunch of devices across Lebanon, indiscriminately
killing civilians. The, um, Diddy situation. Habit. Mark Robinson, the then-goober-notorial
candidate of North Carolina, was outed for having referred to himself as a Black Nazi on porn forums.
And the Teamsters Union decided to not endorse anyone for the presidency. Bucking tradition,
they had previously endorsed the Democrat for basically ever. October, I had a bit of a meanty
bee. I took me a break. I stepped away. Probably because of all the things that I've been talking
about, among other personal situations. And so I just kind of, vibed for a while and caught up on
sleep and tried to be good to myself. Some stuff probably happened. It was mostly people yelling at
each other on the internet and everybody pointing fingers at everybody about everything. November,
the girl did not win. Also Netanyahu now has a formal arrest warrant.
December, we are here. Australia passed a bill disallowing social media from having users under
the age of 16. Biden pardoned his son. There's the, there's the payoff from the foreshadowing.
Trump has appointed just a who's who of terrible picks for his cabinet. Elon Musk was again denied
his $50 billion pay package, making him very mad. The French government collapsed. Well done,
Macron. Assad's grip on Syria since 2000 has finally crumbled and he had to flee the country
from the, the civil war that he lost. Two department in a holland, yeah. Two DHS agents were charged
with selling bath salts that were confiscated from criminals back to the people they got caught.
A whistleblower from open AI was found dead in his apartment. That's the third one that I talked
about this year. Well, third whistleblower from a company, a judge attempted to stop the onion
from purchasing info. We're in incel gamers got really, really, really upset from the game awards
and they started to call Siri in the Witcher four ugly, which is madness. It is actually wild.
You guys come on now. You can, you can change. I promise it's going to be okay and we'll
eventually forgive you, but you're, you're being a bit of a weirdo. And lastly, possibly the most
important story of the year, big mooshi. And so here we are. We talked about a lot of stuff this
year. Obviously I didn't cover everything that happened, but that's just a handful of things
that I picked that were covered this year. It's the end of the year. This is the last episode
of the year. And I just want to say thank you for being here. And as we look towards the future,
I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's going to get rough. We're looking towards four years
of incredible difficulty and we're looking towards four years of absolute madness,
basically every single day. And I know this sucks to hear, but it's true. The community that we
established for ourselves in these next four years is going to be critical. Make sure you're
reaching out to people locally in addition to people online. I'm going to keep doing what I can do to
bring a little bit of joy, shed a little bit of sunlight on situations. We'll see. It's going to
be rough. We only get through it together. But for now, I want you to relax. And as always, take
care, be well, and I'll see you in 2025. Bye-bye.