2023 in review

2023 was certainly a year. Our Prime Minister got fined for not wearing a seatbelt, Paul O'Grady's passing left millions of dog lovers and radio fans mourning, and shortly after some bloke got crowned king in a ceremony full of horse manure in high definition. The long-running series of Governmental cock-ups continued as they lost more seats and dithered from crisis to crisis, the usual. Also the F-22 got it's first air-to-air kill against a balloon of all things.

At the halfway point we all became submarine experts, Barbenheimer took the internet by storm until corporations tried to be funny and Hollywood writers went on strike probably in retaliation. The Beatles released their final song until the next one comes along, David Tennant returned briefly to Doctor Who, and I couldn't think of any news from December to put here (E3 being officially over feels too lacklustre, even for this).

Reddit, after going public, decided to axe it's free API promise which killed off all the good mobile apps and led to an exodus from the site – but in their hopes to get the coveted digital service cock-up of the year award they were swiftly beaten by Elon Musk. In a dramatic move he finally renamed Twitter to Formerly Twitter and in a desperate attempt to keep money flowing in told advertisers to go fuck themselves. 🤔

Google, deciding that having the largest market share of internet browsers, search engines, and phone operating systems wasn't good enough, tried to wrangle more power from the web with a dodgy DRM system they realised nobody actually wanted. They also tried blocking ad blockers on YouTube. Ad blockers just got better.

All throughout this the continued push in AI brought forth major strides in image and text generation, yet as a Language Model I am unable to discuss such a topic in the form of a 'quirky and engaging blog post'.

Myself? Same old. Started some naff blog, bought a Steam Deck, went through the install Linux on a ThinkPad rite of passage, said goodbye to my old desktop as I built a new one (RIP R9 390). Finally caught Covid, one tooth removed, went on antidepressants twice, GPs proved to be as useless as ever, life goes on xx

The stats

• 1 new website
• 18 blog posts (including this one!)
• 5 years of sobriety
• 12 books read
• 20 games I purchased on sale and never played
• 1 extremely sleep-deprived article pitch to The Guardian which they didn't respond to because the liberal agenda fears me it had no typos it was bad.
• 11 times my gay cat caught something (not including fleas)
• Word of the year: Meandering
• Favourite game: Super Metroid

Blog posts wot didn't make the cut

• Recapturing imagination – Lamenting the loss of my childhood imagination, I went on a journey to seek it back. I fizzled out after a few weeks.
• When search engines don't search [what you want] – A quick dive into search engines being useless on a whim. And advertisements.
• Learning to love Linux – Meandering. A lot of things worked until they didn't until I tried Kubuntu.
• [something about declining political standards] – Everyone thinks they're a pundit.
• Why are lights so bright? – Every device has a retina burning LED, adding resistors costs money, and I simply didn't get around to fleshing it out
• People to send straight to hell – "Satirical" list of minor actions & behaviours that ought to immediately send people to eternal damnation.

That about wraps it up, ignoring everything I missed. Hopefully 2024 is better xoxo

Olive