At the start of January in 2025, I had a premonition that in 2026 the world would be over. Or to repeat my words in a more exact phrasing, I said I feel like 2025 is the last year. It was a text message I sent to my brother David that day. It was a strange thing to humour, but I can't deny that in early 2025 I had that feeling. It's also a kind of statement that I've never - not even in the other particularly dangerous 2020's years - declared so shamelessly.
It's now just over 11 months later, and all we have for doomsday prediction is theories. The world hasn't done what I said it would yet, and 2025 is almost over. As we started going ahead in early December however, the feeling only got stronger, though it's dimmed down more recently.
If you ask the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which I have talked about on this blog before, then in terms of science and math 2025 is technically our most likely apocalypse year so far.
It's pretty unsettling that they picked a spiky number this year, at least to me. They don't normally do that. Most Doomsday Clock values are an amount of seconds divisible by 5, both high and low counts. To have a 9 at the end and say "we hope you intuit that merely decreasing this thing by one second is a stark tell about how close we are to global catastrophe" really comes on strong. The meaning I make up of it is that we're in the final countdown. That it'll slowly decrease by one second every time until it's so low that we're not lucky enough that it even has to reach a number below 30 before we're gone.
But of course that doesn't work if I was right about 2025 being the "last year". And what does "2025 is the last year" even mean?
It's worth explaining that most likely I typed the message that way because the gut feeling demanded it. I could have said "I think the world is going to end before 2026" but that's not what the oracle feeling was requesting. We would lose information if we changed it to anything other than "I feel like 2025 is the last year."
Let me make it clear that this is the first time I've ever gone this far to say I think a specific year on Earth will be our last one and I plan on never doing it again. There's no point in taking it seriously if my own one has any record of being wrong. If this fails once, it's logically proven that my armageddon intuition is unreliable. As if the connotations of "fails" agree with the fact that this failing would be a good thing here.
But so far, at this time of writing, we don't know if the prediction is wrong. I guess this line will stand out next year.
89 Seconds to Midnight was also something that happened later than that premonition text message. The Bulletin update happened in late January, and I later joked that they'd given us the assessment too early. It
was famed to be at Two Minutes to Midnight at one popular reference of
extreme danger in history, but I would love to see it get that far away
from midnight now. Can you imagine? It's been below two minutes since year zero of this decade.
Before it all goes up in flames, I want to list some scary years that happened since I was born and talk about what was wrong with them. Many of the terrible things in here are significant on a scale no less than global, and some of them are just mine.
I think at one point I kind of wanted my theory to be true. So I wouldn't have to go through what I'm going through anymore. But considering all the hard work I'm just beginning to finish to big results and all the nice things I just got, resetting the world now would be pretty sad. But I love the Cosmos TV show description of what we've done, and of course losing more than 12,000 years of human progress would be sad. I wonder if it's too late. It's an amazing world since the last half of the twentieth century, but all the stuff we love from each other and the air to putting USB sticks in computers and our favourite fiction is in trouble.
The third millennium is off to a bad start.
2001
None of the years I will be covering today are from the 90's, nor will I do 2000 even if you don't believe it's from the 1990's in your understandable decade system. I wasn't conscious, and the world just wasn't bad enough. To be fair, I wasn't very aware of being alive in 2001 either.
The 2001 part is a special entry here. It doesn't fit the same way as the others, and I can't say much about it, but it's significant for a reason that you know and that I'll document anyway.
I was asleep on the morning of September 12th, 2001 in my bedroom in far-east New Zealand, and nobody bothered to wake me up just to show my small child self a chilling TV news report about how a couple of hijacked planes killed more than 2,000 people. Sometimes I kind of wish they had woken me up to see the broadcast, that would have been an irreplaceable moment of spooky memory. Though that would be too much to ask.
For most of my life, 9/11 hardly affected me. I even made some brutal jokes about it online before. Though in the 2020's the chilling nature of what it actually was began to be obvious to me, and further into the future than that I began to wonder how much better the world could be without that one day in American history. It's not like America got crippled or fully turned around just by this one event and just at this time, we know its military and government did horrible things before Y2K even started to loom ahead, but it's hard to imagine that a 9/11-free timeline would go to the same level of racism, misguided revenge and disastrous foreign relations in America. Also this event was most likely the big reason, for America, that mass surveillance became so widespread, starting under a facade of increasing security in response.
I would be interested to see how progressive the world is where 2001 went straight from August to October.
2014
This was where I realized with comprehension that the world was a dangerously authoritarian place in some way, with large, powerful, sinister forces that had control of half of everything and were invisibly moving to make the lives of civilian working class people like me worse.
It started with the extremely low-key news that a trojan free-trade deal called TPPA, or The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, was proposed for New Zealand and 11 other countries in the Pacific while underground bad actors were trying to secretly embed it into our democracies while disguising it as "trade".
I'm going to nail it into you right now. TPPA was dangerous. It was a convoluted and powerful legislation designed to kill democracy. I'm dead fucking serious. You can look up TPPA right now if you want to, but reading the papers will be too incomprehensible for most of you to know what it means, and Wikipedia won't tell you shit.
TPPA was like malware for your country that makes governments powerless to act in favour of their voters or themselves if a big corporation found out and disagreed, because the government could be easily sued in overseas offshore kangaroo court tribunals for fuckloads of money with the excuse being "this country is hurting our investments" until it's no longer viable to fight and so your country just starts doing what corporate will wants it to. It's called Investor-State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS. This was happening at the same time NZ's shitty National Party was running the country, with John Key leading it, sending police to Nicky Hager for his disturbing real life corruption exposition book about National and its emails, and environmental concerns being extremely high as - historically - I see a picture online by the Green Party that flatly and sorrowfully says that our common seagull is suddenly a threatened species. And they used to be more common on our beaches than a pest.
2014 was also the year of the huge NSA surveillance disclosures and when the Five Eyes, codenamed FVEY, were exposed. Thank you, Edward Snowden. And Chelsea Manning. For the unaware, that's five countries including America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, getting spied on by the NSA, apparently to protect us but get real, they do it because they don't respect privacy human rights and want to control us. The National Security Agency of America, and untangentially the CIA, are supposed to do something to protect their homelands but are hiddenly yet notoriously evil. If you wanted any proof that they don't have you as a priority, note that the stupid rhetoric always goes "you don't have anything to fear if you have nothing to hide" but the NSA freaks out and attacks people every time somebody reveals the human rights and privacy violations that they hide, almost catching Edward Snowden and then - fuck them for doing this - torturing other whistleblowers and journalists. I hadn't even heard of the torture of Chelsea Manning at one point yet still accurately theorized "if they had caught Edward Snowden, they'd just be torturing him for no reason". Many Internet users I saw were disgustingly comfortable with all this.
Meanwhile, infuriatingly,
even if you knew about TPPA and knew you had to stop it, you were
usually unable to explain it to exterior people because of how
complicated and concealed it was. I still don't know how to personally, in my own words, fully explain to unconvinced people how it works. "You need to know about how dangerous
TPPA is." "I see, it's an agreement designed to boost trade." "Hey, if
this passed our government could get sued for millions of dollars by
corporations." "Can't they do that already?" "FUCK!"
In the time prior to TPPA being sealed away like an ancient curse, this fight was massive. There were gigantic protests three times in one year, usually getting bigger each time, and some real political activism figures were getting involved. An entire citizen's initiative called It's Our Future was built solely in order to stop TPPA. There were lots of YouTube videos made about this cause to spread awareness, all with varying levels of tonal spookiness and accurate clarity. I was shit scared of TPPA, so I helped to stop it. With a big sense of relief, you can find web pages online now that say "TPPA was". The TPPA died in February 2017.
2018
It's hard for me to talk about 2018, because it's actually a year I kind of don't remember. Sure, it's the year I figured out how to make a game and then published five of them, which kicks ass, but it's also a year of depression memory loss and mind-wiping. I had used pills angrily to dangerous excess the month before, after all. It started out very weird and I hardly remember most of it.
One thing I can hold onto right now though, one small shred of memory I can feel and believe in, one that can claim to give it a place here, is the heightened alertness of climate change.
We're not better off now than we were in 2018 for climate change. Until you hear about it in the news, we're hardly doing anything sufficient to stop it. But 2018 feels like it's the year I got really tuned into it.
I have a record in a book of many dreams I've previously had - with the executive decision to put in a rule that means it will not have written dates, which I no longer put the effort into maintaining. So, I'll never see which dreams in there were 2018 and which weren't, but there are a lot of fucked up climate change dreams in there. At that point in time the concept really took over my awareness. Icebergs were melting, and the water around the world was going to rise high. My dreams showed fantastical and non-fantastical scenes of familiar places that were super flooded compared to before, with anxiously high sea levels. The scariest ones are probably the roads in Auckland City that are broken up and too close to the ocean. The roads appear sometimes in my sleep, but I don't all that often have these dreams anymore.
With everything going on right now, stopping climate change in 2025 feels like it's a project on the backburner.
2020
Ironically 2020 was a pretty stable and happy year for me. I was comfortable and socializing, I got heartedly into some of the videos like Star Fox gameplay footage from ClementJ642 that I'd never watched before, and I was in a great, almost daily-participated development cycle with Bridge of Fate. But it also pressingly involves us with the events of the world's most significant of all modern pandemics. I was not affected so much by the consequences of COVID-19, like a potted cactus during an unexpected low-rainfall season. But I bet you were.
I could have involved 2016 with this list, and that is where I've seen commentary about nightmare nightmares with a string of celebrity deaths and the social fabric of our reality snapping and where America started to go mad, but I did not commit to memory what society was like there. And lots of people like 2016, though I named it Year of the Teardrop due to how much I apparently struggled with mental health. That's hard to recognize now, the year cluster around 2022 was so much worse.
The issue with 2020 is not just the way people had to stay indoors and self-isolate (that, or deal with their role as an essential worker, plus there's the uncivilized mandate-opposition thing that was ridiculous in America) get vaccinated, deal with the fact that some people wouldn't get vaccinated, and, often, actually get the virus and survive it, through a period that a friend described to me as having "terrible brain fog". Or maybe somebody you know actually died. People cited statistics saying that the percentage of deaths was low, but nuance would tell you that you better wish for that percentage to be a lot lower. People died. And the American government was horrid with its response to the crisis, even when Joe Biden was in office.
There's something not too bad, yet terrible, and more lasting in effect that 2020 did. The thing that appears to scare people about 2020 according to widespread talk online is that it was the year that life started to feel unreal. Like a mass disassociation from reality. Even though after 2019 I'm not sure if I can feel it. It also was the year I found out about the meme of Liminal Spaces, strange images which I feel are highly characteristic of the time, and how people feel now.
The first week of January 2021 was when the prestigious moment changer "bro wake up it's 2007" Halo machinima video came to be online, and many directly related images and other videos sharing the sentiment. It's no secret that post-2019 world circumstances have many of us feeling disillusioned and heartbroken. The "Wake up it's <year from the past>" formula is one of my favourite things about the Internet right now. I need to write a Figment Area post just about those pictures on The Internet and how I feel about it. It's the collective consciousness processing grief of all that's been lost in our world. It's a response to the direction the world went in being awful. If you don't understand why people are doing it, and how serious they are and how serious it is, I don't think we would socially get along well.
2023
Saving steps and skipping past 2021 and the fabulous 2022 period of watching Ross's Game Dungeon, two big and almost monumental-enough years to take the time to write about, we have the year that computers really fucked up.
In the beginning of 2023 my thyroid was about to freak out, my cat Quiksilver was dead, and the war in Ukraine was still going, for a Doomsday Clock reading of just 90 seconds away from midnight. Soon enough we'd find out that a war in world news to eclipse it had started in Gaza.
It's also the year that we saw a rise to generative artificial intelligence. I feel bad for people who were born the year after who won't have been born early enough to remember when content generation was normal.
I believe that when humanity discovered generative AI, we fucked up. No, I don't think that making it better at producing good results or making it secure will make it a non-mistake.
After DALL-E 2 made the news in 2022, things were quiet for a bit. Before suddenly happening very fast. The moment of realization for me came when I watched Tom Scott's video in February of 2023: "I tried using AI. It scared me." I still remember the tone of the video and how he said this could be the kind of technology curve that you get when an invention makes a difference. ChatGPT was the big one as it had a completely exceptional ability to forge academic papers and finish your fucking computer code. Tom Scott's code getting finished by ChatGPT on the spot and him being totally surprised - and this guy is highly versed in computer science and programming - was the prominent point. And ChatGPT was still stupid. And it's still stupid now. And I don't want it to be smart.
Generative AI should be no more than a toy, a creepy, ominous spinthariscope that sits there being borderline useless and amusing us above the board instead of being the core of nuclear bombs. The "Neural Blender" website and The Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash were hilarious. At this point I don't even know if I could find a way to play with the primitive machine learning models that made them.
As it stands, the analogy of 2023 AI is more like somebody discovered the "use" for Uranium, then plenty of people started not-so-secretly and very-secretly inserting it into batteries for our phones, meanwhile somebody in a dark compound worked with a team to create a single bomb that could destroy the whole world. Sure, in 2023 real content existed, and the world didn't get blown up, but we sure started to get irradiated.
That uranium also goes in your own online or offline computer. I've spent the last three years fighting against my personal technology's push to give me cancer. Microsoft fucked up Windows beyond saving that year, even if you stay on Windows 10. And though this is part of the problem with evil and corrupt people, I believe generative AI and its hunger for data can be blamed.
The day I started to really be freaked out by my own computers was when my system running Windows 10 mysteriously installed Copilot.
This is an alleged AI assistant that was the big gun of bad Windows 11 design then and now if you care about your privacy, as ludicrously it would feed itself data from your computer in the form of screenshotting your session every ten seconds. Hell, it's not supposed to be on Windows 10, but in 2024 it decided to be part of my taskbar and start menu there anyway. Yeah, at least that mention of mine didn't happen in 2023. My brain would have imploded. Windows 10 was described by Microsoft previously as the last ever Windows version. Look how that turned out. On Windows 10 and Windows 11, it's a pain to remove if you can at all - you may previously have thought you uninstalled it, but secretly it is not in reality uninstalled - and even then it can just come back. So can Microsoft Edge, which it relies on. Both malicious programs masquerading as direct company support and help are rooted deeply into the system, like a racist poster hung up on a wall that has sharp shards of glass embedded into its glue that'll injure you if you try to tear it down.
So, in running away from Windows, I will escape from a need to always be online, years of horrible data collection, no way to save my own files outside the cloud, constant unstoppable OS updates, and possibly my entire fucking computer accidentally becoming corrupted and unusable. Because I can't stay on Windows 10 forever, whether I dangerously rip Copilot out of it or not.
I think it's all linked. Microsoft really wanted to strengthen Copilot's AI for their own gain, so they made Windows 11 always online so that the screenshots can always transmit overseas, and made cloud storage the only way to use your files so that they can train the AI on your personal files too, and then put Copilot on fucking Windows 10 so that savvy users would have a harder time trying to avoid it. It's a big web of malicious intent.
Among other bullshit they did to the game, in 2023 Microsoft brought out a new EULA for Minecraft with bullshit rules, like, just for two examples before I get out of here, anti-adult content guidelines, and Using "Minecraft" as a significant part of a creative work, such as a youtube video, is no longer allowed. It's too horrible for me to want to bother reassessing it.
I had a bad thyroid for almost all of 2023 and didn't feel confident about migrating away from Windows, plus my computers were in need of service and repair, so all this felt much worse.
2023 was also the year that I browsed online and found a screenshot revealing the announcement of Neuralink. Fucking Neuralink. "This won't be abused at all." Of course it could be if we don't shut down Elon Musk and his stupid company. This is, of course, comfortably into the era of the public being fully aware that Musk is a scumbag, even though he's not yet indulged in crony inexcusable politics, just crony inexcusable capitalism. He'd bought Twitter the year before, and in 2023 the platform under him would get really bad.
Plus online web platforms and influencers were doing terrible things to the very growth and development of newer children in the world. I don't know when this started, but at this point Generation Alpha has a serious problem. I can't believe so many parents apparently raise their kids to spend that much time on the embarrassment pale imitation that is their version of the Internet that kids from Gen Alpha get to grow up with, I really don't understand why they aren't just spending time with their kids the way Millennials' parents spent time with theirs. I can't imagine the trauma of being a kid who instead of reading cute, well-drawn picture books with their parents, the parent gets neglectfully lazy and gives their child a tablet that systematically destroys their brain with all these images when it plays all kinds of eerie, distracted, nightmarish content from badly-curated online uploads from around the world. All resulting in terrible consequences like malformed handwriting grades and bullying in school of kids who don't know about shitty trends and the conveniently disturbing desire to, as a six-year-old, get skincare products, for some reason. I was born before 2003 and I don't even want those bottles now. Thinking about life in a world where I'm older and kids with those brains have inherited the controls is scary, and thematically it alludes in a dark way to the less-discussed way children behaved in the classic 1984 book.
Back to the Neuralink thing. At this point, in any world half as immature, dangerous, or politically wrong as ours, absolutely fuck the existence of any technology that can read the thoughts of human brains. That's a box you do not want to open. And my brain is sacred. A brain is a personal temple of being. I don't think you should even be allowed to tell somebody to promise to answer any and every question for a while with full honesty. Fuck that Futurama joke about businesses inserting ads into your dreams being handled so callously in 1999 too. Maybe they didn't care because back then the idea wasn't so close to reality.
We shouldn't have any way of being prosecuted for things that are at our spirits' absolute core. Otherwise you literally get thought police. People seem to not know that in George Orwell's 1984, which I read (it's a big reason I was so scared in 2014), the Thought Police are depicted in a world where they don't actually read Winston Smith's or anybody else's thoughts. Though there is some strange technology. The chapters of any anti-Party character, main or sidestory in role would be over in a few sentences if the government of that story could just see inside their head. They see inside your depressing concrete apartment with a constant video call, that's what they do.
It's not hard to see why people should be afraid of Neuralink. Respectably, the concept of brain interfacing was so bad that Fight For The Future created an initiative called Leave My Brain Alone no later than 2021, trying to ban neural data exploitation ahead of the event.
Finally, we have the horrors of government in New Zealand. I wasn't counting on the shitty National Party winning after experiencing six years of peace of mind with sane, 70% good-doing government that collaborated with New Zealand Greens, but I really wasn't expecting Act to get involved. The NZ government of 2020 was luckily the sane one and it had a world-class response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, in the televised 2023 New Zealand general election, this minor right-wing nuthead party went from somebody who you just avoid to being a bunch of people worse than National who got to ride along in a coalition with them. It was like a 1% polling political party that I hardly even acknowledged until then.
New Zealand has a system called MMP, so the amount of votes a political party get will influence how many people who represent it get to sit down in the big hive-looking building where our fate is discussed. This can be great for balancing out a bad party by having more of your less-polled allies who aren't the lead party get to influence the big decisions, and it can be a pain when there's some people like the ones in National that you're trying and failing to get rid of.
The problem is that Act is controversial and rightly so, BUT could do anything they want without National scrutinizing it because yeah, it's just Act's fault. National wouldn't have the boldness to do some of these things on their own. They got the far right party to suggest it for them.
That year the right wing had built their campaign on top of a racist platform and deception, and it worked for them. For some reason Act thought it was alright to question the Treaty of Waitangi - that's like a whole New Zealand racial relations history thing right there, no room in this post to explain - as if it shouldn't be accepted as is, and implicitly admit that they wanted to change Maori rights for the worse... While claiming vocally that removing the Maori roll and changing a 200-year-old agreement that was about making Pakeha and Maori equal. On the night I watched the votes get counted on New Zealand television and told my friend "I'm scared."
2023 was hard. Due to my own personal health I just kept getting into bad days and couldn't stomach it. But the state of the world only gets worse with each coming year.
2024
AI became a new normal that we just had to deal with, and New Zealand was being run idiotically. The country was doing its thing again where I had to engage with several online government petitions to fight to keep me and my co-kiwis safe. And to protect vital conservation land from mining. The "overwhelm bomb" was still very much a tactic I was starting to recognize, and my country's government was doing that. A stupid thing the government did was actually ultimately cut or hamstring much of my funding. Disabled people is one of the groups they go after first. I also started out still having a bad thyroid, and was scared all the time of the nightmare world and technology.
At least America wasn't using Donald Trump as their course navigator that year, right?
I had already been informed long enough in advance that I don't remember much about it by a social media post that it was "time to start worrying about the 2024 elections". Let's take a break from that for a minute first, and... Crowdstrike.
Remember Crowdstrike? I hardly even remember it myself, but I know it happened. That was roughly when it became obvious more than ever to me that this many systems of the world shouldn't be dependent on Windows.
Speaking of Windows, 2024 was, again, the year I found Copilot on my fucking Windows 10 computer, which I requested be built more than seven years ago from bought store parts myself. It would be an understatement to call that an intrusion. It was my fucking computer. I had all sorts of trouble and waiting periods that year trying to get my laptop and my tower PC repaired, fast, secure, and running, and then Microsoft was basically telling me to move faster.
I had been lucky enough in 2023 to find somebody who knew basically how to build my tower PC after years of no progress at all, indeed getting the main impossible part done quite suddenly.
But there was still months of not knowing where things would go next and anxiety. Installing Windows 10 was a pain and a series of scares that I mentally stated I never wanted to do again, there was terrible slowness when there wasn't enough RAM in the beginning, and I didn't even have sufficient space to transfer all my laptop files on its one hard drive. And it's not like this computer hardware trouble was affecting the greater world, but what became clear that year was that it would be wise for everybody to get off Windows. It was just easier for most people who aren't me.
My laptop had trouble in 2024 and the year after. It started with loud grinding fans which I had a high-up tech friend air blow dust out of before discovering that it wasn't enough and that I'd have to get new fans for it, and the main trouble ultimately ended this year with the installation of a much-needed bigger hard drive. All of these abridged and unmentioned tasks with which something had to go wrong, I was full of stress, and couldn't have done without extremely lucky sources of help.
Of course climate change was ongoing and we hadn't done enough to fix that, though some places I had already seen said there was hope. I just couldn't emotionally engage with or knowingly acknowledge it for very long with all the rising authoritarianism and other fear in the world. Not to mention my still ongoing computer mission.
Donald Trump made the news in a "good way" that year, as he kept being found guilty with some of his many crimes, while not being the president of the United States. I know it's called "hush money", and I don't want to talk about what that actually was. He was found guilty on 34 counts, and somehow he still hung around not getting kicked outta there.
In November, the stupid bastard was elected by his country again. I hadn't even had my birthday yet. This time, we knew in advance that it would be much worse than in 2017, the first year of a term during the last time. It mostly centers around a play the republicans were working on called Project 2025. It's surreal to see that title now. On the topic of Project 2025, I think you know where this is going.
The month after, a bad healthcare CEO was shot by Luigi Mangione, which for me and some other people, in spite of the savagery, seeing as it's not hard with all the things companies have done this decade to see why, at least felt like a small emotional victory.
2025
Here it is, much like you knew was coming, and yet worse than you ever dreamed all around. The last year.
Politics were fucking bad in America by the time we were consciously tuned in, being the way that people projected that Donald Trump 2.0 would be worse than the original 2016 elect, only much worse in addition to even that.
The words ring through my head from the year's first episode of Last Week Tonight. "We're in the middle of a hostile government takeover." "What are we going to do." I was already glad to not live in America before Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the rest of their oligarchs started hacking away at sonic speeds through what little functionality and balance the country had.
This year I had Copilot come back even though I'd used a command line code that should have removed it, and used an external program to remove Edge more than once only temporarily because Copilot apparently depends on it, and Gmail and Firefox got fucked up by their own stupid decisions as Gmail tried to force us to use Gemini (an AI assistant that I wouldn't willingly give two prompts to tell it that it can't fuck) before deciding to scrape our emails for AI data collection at the condition that you didn't disable common-sense email client features that worked perfectly fine before AI inflated, and Firefox suddenly decided it would no longer hold itself to a rule or standard that it won't spy on its users or sell their data.
It was also kind of a year of hope, but only because us underlings clawed and snatched for it. People in general seem to be more awake to the shit that was going on and how it was insidiously balanced against them now, with a huge disdain for tech overlords and generative AI being widespread. We also know what governments are doing now, if we didn't know before.
The 2024 consumer movement known as Stop Killing Games was a welcome presence last year, and this year it miraculously reached a positive conclusion where Ross Scott, their "leader" was made happy again when got the 1.4 million signatures that he wanted in aid of what he wanted - online-focused video games to be legally required to get a solid end-of-life plan that enables customers to host the servers after shutdown in place of the development company to protect the purchase and enable preservation - in spite of a slowed signature counter and extreme bad faith smearing of the initiative and disinformation about what Ross actually asked for. Europe can save gaming. This was our first victory of the people at a scale like this of what you could call "the whole time period". It was an amazing month, I tell you. I remember doing the math with how many signatures were coming in per day since his despondent "I think Stop Killing Games is ending now" video, and being like "we'll be at a million in only that many days? That can't be right".
Later a surprising emergence came in the form of Louis Rossmann convincing what could be tens of thousands of people to change their Internet profile avatar to Clippy, from the peaceful days of artificial computer software assistants. This is number 2, and though there might not be a third this year, I'll take it. This was more than just doing some fad. It didn't start as a joke, either. This was the first stage in people uniting against abuses of power in AI, and against various anti-consumer practices. Though a small difference the first stage may seem. It turns out that changing your avatar to Clippy from years before is actually viable and popular and indicates that a lot of people stand for technological freedom and human rights, and people often put their own personality into the icons.
Something you see a lot is that people say Clippy opposes
age-verification. Because of course, we had to find another barrier to
the Internet this year and the supreme court of America even approved
it. You still can't go into a tall YouTube comment section at this time of writing without finding some paperclips. Even small comment sections are not something you'd want to wager a heart attack on not finding some kind of Clippy on. Finding paperclip icons in comments has been kind of a joy for me. And I have to admit that being pissed off at AI took me a while. I was late to have a moral objection to its very core, as the technology that's not a way of helping us really but of offloading the human experience of creation to some genie who makes up the specifics of what you want during translation. I also don't want a tree to burn down every time I do a fucking Google web search.
There's also the massive unwise and destructive deployment of enforcement officers in America that, while it's not happening here, is still putting fear on real people and taking legal - LEGAL - immigrants away from where they should be and putting them in basically 2020's American concentration camps, turning "ICE" into a slur of an all-caps word. New Zealand has problems at home, but I wish things could be better in the worst actor for immigration and racial equality in the world. If I got America picked for that role incorrectly then I still want the worst actor in this area to be better. When the worst example gets better, the story improves. Right now the example America gives has lots of bombing speedboats, which if you try to imagine just feels eerily violent and stupid.
There's an "overwhelm bomb" tactic that people with lots of money and power are understood to be using all the time this year, by doing heaps of horrible shit in a short space of time to throw ordinary people off balance. You can even hear one of Donald Trump's friends say that this is his and his crony-circle's strategy in a well-exposed Last Week Tonight episode. It's practically in everything now, forcible AI, web services, government policy, and my theory is that it's ramping up now because of the recent consumer movement claws for a better scenario. More straightly, the theory I have is that power and money is attacking us more because they see us finding our voice and fighting back. Stop Killing Games has some of them directly retaliating, I'm sure of it.
And I found out more recently than paperclips or AI coming out that Android was so bad that you can't even install your own software on it without approval any more and it killed my drive to even continue my prospect of developing mobile ports of my video games.
2025 has one last parting surprise for humanity it seems, and that is a major threat to the practicality of our fight against climate change.
NCAR, or the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was revealed to be on America's agency chopping block just a few days ago. I didn't even know what this building was until the post from Katherine Hayhoe, but you should believe her when she says it's important.
"Everyone who works in climate and weather has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources. Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet."
I really don't know what to say. If you're reading this post early into its lifespan, you're still in 2025. Though being retrospective like I am, I know fully well there's going to be an inescapable unending amount of years in what will eventually be "right now" for readers where 2025 is just a flashback. Indeed one of the most prized jokes I've come up with is "future professors will say The Amazing World of Gumball is a popular show from 5,000 years ago." Actually I can dream of the humour involved for people who are reading this post 5,000 years from now. Yeah I thought of that. But 2025 will be a wound for a while. In the future if we survive humanity might never stop talking about it. Or they'll never stop talking about 2026 because that's where a serious catastrophe occurs, which for me at this posting time is the future.
The End?
If you don't believe the world is going to end soon after this post is published, I can see the idea. This, however, may be the worst year on Earth since the entire century started. I also still have to profess that this Doomsday Clock reading, this 89 seconds to midnight thing, sends a strong signal and seems more worrisome this month than in the month the Bulletin press came out. I said to a man that I feel like 2025 is the last year. I don't have to wait long to find out, but the rest of the time this year up to now was not easy. I don't think I actually want 2025 to be the last year, in any even slightly negative way. I had the premonition because it just came to me. And this was before I lost my dog. You remember that. Two of the most unique free-roaming house mammals dead in the space of less than three years, though I love having Ziggy.
This blog has been a drag too. Maybe I thought I wouldn't, but in the end I spent this entire year trying to make fucking post separators so that something wouldn't touch something else, mostly because of Shadow's death, and it happened yet again when I unexpectedly found reason to write about another cute blue heeler that was precious because me and mum adopted Ziggy.
Life from day to day has been me being unwilling to continue and angry, screaming even, hoping for the long nightmare to end. I know it's your nightmare too, but most of the readers here won't have a fucked up repeat past trauma brain. Nor are they basically suicidal. And the world could do something horrible to my already subpar life if I stick around too long. That's why I don't necessarily hope I'm alive in 2026.
I often just lie on my bed for a useless long amount of time, half of my face on covered in the mattress, wishing for things to be better and feeling placeless.
This month has been adorned with lots of two songs echoing in my head throughout my time wandering from moment to moment, always remembering Trivium's Detonation and Tears for Fears's Everybody Wants to Rule the World. They both showed up in videos I watched a few times recently. I already watched Dear Tony Shaun, but Tears for Fears came to me personally for the first time only this year. The video is just music while a retro tech channel owner uses lots of pre-2000's equipment like a tape deck and a record player. The big draw is in the title. The title fictionally says to the viewer that you wake up, you are still in the 90's, and 2024 was just a bad dream. I am pretty sure I found it for the first time in 2025.
Detonation is like the orchestral action music building up to some climax, and Everybody Wants to Rule the World is like an unsettling epilogue played in some dream of an aftermath that sounds happy but is used, as some songs often are, as a mismatched tonal pairing in something like the credits, when the world is screwed.
I don't know when you're reading this, but for me as a wall of text it's 2025 right now, and I think the end of the world could go either way, and if it goes false, you should know that I will keep my silence about future predictions of the end of Earth without concrete factors every year from then on. Like I said, if I wrongly say that the world will end in a specific year once, it's possible for my world end intuition to be wrong. Though I don't think the exact contents behind the premonition necessarily were the world actually ending in 2025.
Shit is just creepy right now. It doesn't look right for our people right now, and I know 2026 has every chance of being worse if we make it to January. Experts keep leaving ominous scratchings on the cracking plastic paper of the decaying Internet about how much danger we're in, and simply being said a lot without being the case now doesn't disprove a statement. I'm sure plenty of people in ancient Greece said something was wrong for decades, and their civilization is not where it used to be now. You could also have said for centuries that airplanes wouldn't be successfully built in the previous millennium, but eventually airplanes got figured out. Artificial intelligence that gets smarter in an ultimate way and acts like an online demonic superhuman is something warned of in invention too, though I think we'd probably blow ourselves up for a different reason before then. The world is not safe and I don't think it would be safe to gamble somehow on 2025 December 31st happening for sure until you and I actually exist at a point past there. People reading in 2030 will probably snarl at all this and joke about it, but all of you need to understand how abnormally scary this year was, and how normalized the various threats of it became. Believing the world could end at any time is like believing you could have been injured the last time you had a major stumble and almost tripped on stairs.
No such gamble seems to exist, except for maybe one. The time you decide to spend. Maybe it's time to enjoy each day of December like it could be your last. I don't like 2025, the thought of going into next year, or the possibility of all my work coming to nothing soon. I have just began as a game developer, I've been working on making my computers better for countless months, and I still haven't released my awesome 3D sandbox mod for its many fans to finally play for themselves yet, nor have I blown up as a creator of any kind of fictional media yet. I believe I can, if I get to live and thrive long enough. My depression is horrible, but I do feel a little hope for 31 days from now.
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