Table of Contents

Wot happened this year

2025. What a complete faff.

On the first day a Cybertruck blew up outside a Trump hotel, serving as an omen for the year to come. Nintendo announced the Switch 2, and Elon Musk performed a totally innocuous salute on stage, which just happened to be identical to a Nazi salute.

The Netflix show Adolescence took the UK by storm, bringing another year of politics via telly. The US Gov invited a journalist into a Signal chat, and Trump went bonkers with AI-generated tarriffs.

Yeah, the first year of Trump’s second term makes up a lot of this. Soz.

The Minecraft film released in April – unleashing hordes of TikTok users screaming Chicken jockey. Skype died (🦀), and now there’s an American Pope. Feels weird that there’s a pope you can speak plain English with.

Kids started fires with their Chromebooks, Leeroy Jenkins hit 20 years old, and X’s AI chatbot Grok started replying to every prompt about “white genocide” in South Africa. It’d soon go on a racist benders and call itself ‘MechaHitler’, with X’s CEO retiring a day later. At least we got a nice chuckle out of Orc City while it went down.

Also speaking of chatting AI, Fortnite players got the late James Earl Jones to say fuck.

The viral moment of the year went to Coldplay, who caught a CEO’s awkward affair live on kiss-cam.

In July the Labour party announced they’d give 16 year olds the vote, then disenfranchised them by blocking off net with the Online Safety Act – on the bright side, myself and half the country seemingly moved to Sweden, so it’s no bother.

Remember that War of the Worlds adaptation with Ice Cube? Terrible, but hularious. Summer tapped off with Labubu dolls and Dubai chocolate reaching peak popularity, and then Silksong finally released!

The Great North Run handed out medals with the wrong city, Trump went mental over paracetamol, and Windows 10 reached EOL.

The global Anglican church split over female bishops & LGBT rights, jewel thieves struck the Louvre, and a certain Windsor became the Andrew formerly known as Prince.

Towards the end of the year we saw a steady release of the Epstein files – overly redacted of course – and… Yeah I’m running out. Does else anyone care that the Doctor Who series 10 soundtrack finally released? Uhhh 6-7????

Notable deaths include Tony Slattery, David Lynch, Val Kilmer, Pope Francis, Kenneth Colley, Felix Baumgartner, Ozzy Osbourne, Drew Struzan, and Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman.

On tech and the web

Big tech & Trump

We’ve all seen the shockingly brazen integration of Big Tech and the Trump administration. After “donating” hefty sums to his campaign, all the CEOs were caught cosying up to him either buy favour against antitrust suits, or to simply avoid his furore.

Funny how Facebook removed LGBT pride themes from messenger and rolled back fact-checking a week before the inauguration, and how all these platforms now call it “The Gulf of America” in the States.

We saw Elon Musk get awarded for his sycophancy with his Department of Regulatory Efficiency scheme. It didn’t cut costs, but at least it gave his unaccountable team of outsides a good chunk of sensitive information.

On the bright side, the breakup between Trump & Musk was legendary. 💅

Can we sod off with AI

It’s been a year of AI marketing hell. You can’t go a minute without some AI chatbot popup, marketing bollocks, or a memo asking you to use the latest AI helper your company has spent an eye-watering amount on. It’s frankly ridiculous.

The sheer continued hype by businesses over anything “AI”, despite dubious qualities, is insane.

For the record, this has been a year where “Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns” was a headline. The words ‘hell future’ spring to mind.

Generative image & video models are able to create uncanny simulacrums. Whilst low effort AI slop drowned our parents’ Facebook feeds last year, now it’s moved on to provocative bollocks and fake animal videos that are becoming harder to discern from reality.Big platforms don’t care as long as it keeps user retention up.

It’s at the point where Instagram – the service dedicated to sharing photos – is swamped under generative AI fakery.

20 years ago it was a faff to upload images to the web, and there were fewer of them. As a result it was easy to tell what images were fake or not. In this hell world of constant easy content, it’s becoming harder under a deluge of generative AI.

Regardless of how much you keep your guard up, there’ll be something that tricks you, even for a moment. And being in a state of constant vigilance is making the web unfun.

Going into the new year, AI proliferation is bringing us hardware shortages and price hikes. AI companies are hoovering up so much hardware that we as consumers will be bearing the brunt of it.

The demand for NAND storage has sent the price of SSDs doubling. OpenAI have made deals to grant them 40% of the world’s DRAM output for the coming years, which has sent RAM prices skyrocketing. Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung.

To put it into context: two years ago I spent £68 on the RAM in my computer, now that same RAM costs over £250. It’s madness.

It’s not just folks building their own PCs who’ll feel the sting, but whoever buys any device. Game consoles, phones, laptops, those weird smart fridges, you name it.

Web censorship ‘for the kids’

An unfortunate trend among the Western world has been the erosion of digital rights & privacy under the banner of protecting children.

The controversial Online Safety Act came into law over here, regardless of objections raised by tech experts, and it’s been a mess.

• The terms for dealing with UK users are so long, draconian, and under the thread of fines that sites have opted to block UK users instead. This matters severely for smaller, niche hobby sites – not so much for the big companies who see fines as the cost of business.
• Users are being asked to prove they’re an adult by sending pictures of their ID and having their face scanned by AI. Of course, these systems have faults and are easily bypassed

A lot of this sensitive data is being processed by overseas companies with lax security standards, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s a catastrophic data leak (earlier this year we saw Discord leak submitted IDs). And of course normalising scanning your ID has been a boon for internet scammers.

Is this really about protecting children from seeing “harmful content” online? Not really, the scope of what’s considered harmful is too large, and the risks of storing IDs is endangering everyone. But if you criticise it, you get told you’re on the side of Jimmy Saville.

Combine this with the Government’s plan for a mandatory Digital ID system, and it’s clear that it’s less about keeping the internet safe for kids, and more for keeping track of the content you see online.

Funnily just like everyone predicted a decade back, a simple VPN bypasses everything.

Of course we’re not the only place taking measures like this. Australia introduced measures to ban under-16s from Social Media, France and multiple US states now require photo ID for accessing 18+ sites – and of course, this can easily be expanded to include things like LGBT content.

Is the internet a safe place for kids? Not really, and it certainly feels less safer with the proliferation of online chat and the shift from the shared family computer to camera phones. But is this wave of legislation actually helping? I doubt it.

Silver linings

Okay, I don’t want to keep it all doom and gloom.

• Meta finally admitted that their plans for a metaverse were a waste. $77 billion down the drain, and we won’t have to hear them market it ever again 🎉
• Again, Skype is dead 🦀
• As much as our parents are getting confused by AI slop, the sheer amount of it, as well as warnings from the media, are leading to more of them being cognisant about what might be AI or not
• We’re seeing more core internet groups split off from parent companies and mergers to go independent:
  • Giant Bomb, a major game reviewing site & streaming group broke free from Fandom
  • Digital Foundry, a beloved games tech & hardware review team, left IGN a year after their Eurogamer buyout
  • PC game storefront Good Old Games got re-acquired by its original co-founder, allowing it to strike free while CD Projekt Red can now focus solely on their RPGs

Life over here 🇬🇧

The UK’s certainly had better years. When the Labour party won last year’s general election, I was stoked; we finally kicked out the aimless sleazy Conservatives, the adults were finally in the room, and we could have meaningful change.

Unfortunately, the Labour they offered wasn’t the Labour we got.

You can’t undo 15 years of decline in a year, but Starmer has been particularly disappointing. Despite his majority he’s spent half the year u-turning on key policies, and using what little remaining capital on weird authoritarian measures (again, the Online Safety Act and pushing for Digital ID).

The general attitude over here is that we’re in a state of managed decline. Energy prices are still soaring, we’re not building enough houses, and it feels like radical change is impossible.

Not to say it’s all been terrible. The Renters’ Rights Bill seems promising, the Employment Rights Act is a step in the right direction, and subsidised buses means I’m not paying an arm and a leg to get anywhere. Can’t really fault that.

A key moment from this year was the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of a woman in the Equality Act in response to transgender women. It was ruled that it was written as to not include trans women, and despite the presiding judge commenting that it shouldn’t be seen as a triumph, the champagne spilt proved those words to be hollow.

What was supposed to clear up a point of confusion with the Equality Act has instead caused more confusion, invalidated gender recognition certificates, and has unfortunately fuelled the hostile attitude towards trans people in this country – to the point now where women are policed on facilities based solely on how they look.

I think it’s safe to say that things are still a mess.

Personal stuff

The stats

• Blog posts: 8
• 6 books read
  • Favourite: Enshittification
• 13 films watched
  • Favourite: 28 Years Later
• 4 TV shows watched:
  • Favourite: Pluribus
• 7 games played
  • Favourite: Cave Story
• Favourite song I listened to: 2-4-6-8 Motorway
• Word of the year: Peccadillo

I mentioned last year that I could actually lose weight. Well towards the end of last year I went from 100kg to 90, and this year… Oh dear, I’ve been straddling that ever since!

Blog posts wot didn’t make the cut

• What I learnt rebuilding* 125 LEGO sets – I spent the first quarter of this year going through my childhood Lego bins in my spare time, trying to recover what sets I could.
  • The Brick Separator is your friend
  • Identify a set by a visually unique piece first
  • Fight the temptation to build as you go along, collate the pieces first
  • Know when to cut your losses. I only managed to complete 11 sets from loose parts.
• On phones and handedness – I have weird hands, and with the size & weight of phones, it’s becoming increasingly impossible to use one with a single hand without causing considerate strain.
• Brexit, 10-ish years on – A decade back we’d be in the midst of the whole referendum campaign, but how on Earth are you supposed to condense everything Brexit in a single blog post?

Highlights from around the web

• AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism – New Socialist
• My 2 Year Journey to Solve the 30-Year Myth of Faceball 2000 – Stop Skeletons From Fighting
• For-Profit (Creative) Software – EndVertex
• Square Theory – Adam Aaronson
• Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? – VelvetShark
• The Timmy Trap – Scott Jenson
• The BEST way to watch THE MATRIX… EVER! – Rocco Botte
• What are you supposed to write about for an aortaversary? – Edward’s Blog
• When Stick Figures Fought – Animation Obsessive
• Disney’s living characters: A broken promise – Defunctland
• Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds – Linus Tech Tips

Conclusion

Eugh.

I don’t think much happened to me this year. I don’t want to be too negative, but circumstances have me stuck in a situation I’d rather not be, and right now depression is kicking my arse.

I don’t particularly have hope for the new year, but yknow, there’s a good chance it’ll be better. Last year I was hopeful, I was trying to be better, I didn’t want to give up on health, but… Eesh, trying to get help can be an uphill struggle over here.

Again, I think my friends have kept me sane throughout this year. That, and the regular forcing out the house to go to a cafe.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer. Hopefully I read more books in the coming year. Cheers x

Olive