#year in review 2021

[lgbtpopcult]

Best WLW TV of 2023

The last of us

Harley Quinn the animated series

Lucky My Love

NCIS Hawaii

wtFock

Special ops lioness

The Morning Show

Station 19

Everything now

Love Senior

Las Pelotaris 1926

Fall of the house of Usher

Stupid Wife

Wheel of Time

Yellowjackets

The Owl House

4 Estrellas

Deadloch

Disenchantment

[akakumoeteru]

I really liked this template so I put together a set for my four years in danmei (mostly MDZS).

I'm honestly super surprised with how much I've managed to draw over the last few years. Art is just one of my many hobbies (the greatest of which is dozing in and out of sleep while reading fanfiction in bed) so for me to have churned out this much is... unlike me haha.

Anyway, you can kind of tell I started running out of steam in 2023 but I'm gonna try and get my mojo back for next year so!! Ganba me, ganba!!

[snowysaur]

2024 year in review/art summary. i realized i never made these for 2021-23 either so here's all of them. i think i haven't been drawing as much these past few years, oh well support me on: patreon | kofi | redbubble

[wikiangela]

✨ Fic Writing Review 2023 ✨

Words and Fics

192,761 words published to ao3

2 fandoms (911 and MCU - mcu was like one fic tho lol)

Most recent drop: I wanna spend my forever like that (911, 8.6k, G)

Longest fic: For a holiday (and forevermore) (911, 95k, M)

Top Fics by Kudos

For a holiday (and forevermore) (95k, M)

I can't love you any more (than I do now) (2.6k, G)

I'd marry you with paper rings (3.4k, G)

me, you, our kid and a dog (4.7k, G)

me and you only equals love (6.6k, E)

My fandom fic events in 2023

I don't think I took part in any this year :( maybe next year haha

Upcoming Events and Projects for 2024

well, right now I'm working on a few wips im hoping to get done in the next few weeks/months (depending on time and inspiration lol):

the alive shannon fic - this is my main focus and i hope to maybe finish it sometime next year but who knows hah (I barely started, it's gonna be a while)

buddie coffee shop au - ive been working on this for so long and it's lowkey on hold now but istg i'll finish this

buddie cheating fic

the natalia fic

married buddie smut

another smut I haven't mentioned yet but it's waiting until i finish married buddie smut

bi eddie fic

and probably some more oneshots lol

but tbh, we'll see where the next year takes me, I can't plan too much bc it never works out haha

rules & tags below the cut

tagged by @exhuastedpigeon @underwater-ninja-13 @hippolotamus @jesuisici33 @jamespearce9-1-1 @theotherbuckley @steadfastsaturnsrings @rainbow-nerdss <333

Rules: Feel free to show whatever stats you have. Only want to show Ao3 stats? Rock on. Want to include some quantitative info instead of stats? Please do this. Want to change how yours is presented? Absolutely do that. Would rather eat glass than do this? Please don’t eat glass but don’t feel like you have to do this either.

no pressure tagging: @malewifediaz @thewolvesof1998 @eddiebabygirldiaz @honestlydarkprincess @spotsandsocks @loserdiaz @lover-of-mine @disasterbuckdiaz @monsterrae1 @jeeyuns @housewifebuck @giddyupbuck @hoodie-buck @spagheddiediaz @daffi-990 and whoever else wants to <3

[brandirecognition]

2023 was a funky year (including work that I can't share + going to grad school) but I still made some neat pieces! on to the next one

[prime-crime-time]

holy fuck I just realised the protagonist in candyman (2021) was suddenly successful with his art because the white art critic loved seeing herself over seeing black people in his previous paintings it was a critique of self-indulgent white people in art who gatekeep from non-conforming pocs

[richardmurrayhumblr]

2021 Tumblr Top 10

1. 275 notes - Nov 28 2021

2. 218 notes - Jul 23 2021

3. 152 notes - Aug 1 2021

4. 136 notes - Jun 23 2021

5. 125 notes - Sep 27 2021

6. 122 notes - Jun 13 2021

7. 118 notes - Dec 21 2021

8. 117 notes - Jun 21 2021

9. 116 notes - Oct 29 2021

10. 108 notes - Dec 26 2021

Created by TumblrTop10

[newtness532]

anyways, after sitting on my bookshelf for almost exactly 3 years i read all the light we cannot see.

[squirrellyshorrorreviews]

The Last Rite (2021)

A medical student suffering from sleep paralysis finds herself plagued by a demonic entity, after moving in with her boyfriend.

Director/Writer: Leroy Kincaide

Production House: Nocturnal

Runtime: 1h 47m

where to watch: hulu

score: 4/10

Legit: every time I see this movie’s image, I think I haven’t seen it before, and then I see it in my notes and I’m like “what?”

There is the heavy implication that this is an exorcism movie, but it reads as more of a haunting/monster feature. The demon/exorcism element doesn’t even come in until part three.

It’s a bit hamfisted in its metaphors. It makes the male lead debilitatingly stupid. Especially since it doesn’t turn out that he’s like… staging the haunting to gaslight the female lead, which was what I thought in the beginning. No, he really is Just Like ThatTM. Which doesn’t work for the type of voice they’re making. Is the monster a metaphor for the abuse? Is it her latent desire to stand up for herself manifesting as a monster? I don’t know?!!

The lead actress KILLS with her possessed acting though. Very Exorcism of Emily Rose and I love a good contortionist. The two priests’ dynamic also salvages the movie in the last act.

but neither can save the movie entire from being just… Meh.

[akakumoeteru]

Happy New Years everyone!! Today is my third anniversary in MDZS so I wanted to put together a three year summary of the art I've done in that time. It's sure... been three years. Here's to hoping I get to draw a ton of Wangxian for a fourth year as well!

[darksouls2yuri]

i have started a list of bigfoot movies on letterboxd

[lestbian]

my brother bought a new mini fridge so i bought his old one for fifty dollars. not a bad deal at all right but he’s cleaning out the old one and graciously gives me a bunch of limited edition mountain dews and i THOUGHT this was a kind gesture but they EXPIRED TWO YEARS AGO.

[jandjsalmon]

Fun Story to Share.

I got my (now 18-year-old) daughter into Ao3 back in 2021. I taught her she should always comment - even if the fic looks old or abandoned or whatever. She did.

Well - she got this email this morning:

The fic was written in 2014 and essentially abandoned.

Bethy read and reviewed in 2021 (and was actually the only person who had commented at all).

Today in 2025 - the final chapter was posted by the author and this was her reply to Bethy’s comment.

———

Never question whether a fic is too old to comment on.

[minody]

anyway i just listened to these albums back to back and they really are just perfect pop albums

like i knew i loved them for reasons but i hadn't listened to them in full in so many years, they really are great pieces of modern production

like they're both so well received, they got radio play, they weren't flops by any means i think, but as album projects they feel underrated in the pop canon

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[absmarchive]

Best and Worst of ACL: Live music returns to Zilker Park