[End of Year] 2025, A Year of Betrayal

[jolikmc]

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This year.  2024.  I think I can summarize it in one phrase:
2024 was a Year of Betrayal.

I was originally going to have a bullet-list of things that went wrong this year, but as I skimmed through my "thoughts blog", I realized that said list would be tremendous, so, I guess I'll focus on what really set me off this year.

The RetroAchievements Incident

The first major incident happened in April.  I was working on some RetroAchievements for, well, RetroAchievements when I was informed that my achievements were "too complex".  Basically, I was trying to make it so the achievements popped when it was the most appropriate.  You know… directly after beating a boss, beating a level, and so on.

No-no, "that's not how we do it here", they told me.  I argued my point with some moderator with a stick up his butt, then begrudgingly said I'd finish things "their way" then never contribute again.  I never got the chance.  They kicked me off the project before I could finish it and kicked me out of the Junior Developers group.  Needless to say, I was most displeased and disassociated with them immediately after.  Fun times.
Wartime Begging and Solicitation

To my next point, if you're unaware, there's a couple of wars going on in the world.  One of them has gotten a lot of attention.  So much attention, in fact, that certain types of people have been using it to guilt-trip people into donating for their cause.  Basically, "Hello, I and my family survived and need money" has become the new "Hello, I'm a foreign prince and will give you money for a small start-up fee".  Worst still, people are falling for it.  God, people are gullible.

Philanthropy and "good will" be damned - never give any significant amount of money to a stranger or any organization without getting something back.
The Effective Closure of ROMhacking.net

Later in the year, I got into another one-sided fight with the administration of an organization.  When ROMhacking.net closed their doors, I politely (and rightfully) pointed out that it wasn't handled very well.  What did I get for my trouble?  An IP ban.  According to the powers that be - or more likely, one very sensitive little weasel - I "had an ax to grind" and "never contributed anything positive".

Buddy, I barely made 100 posts to that community over the course of more than a decade.  Just because you made a rash decision doesn't mean I'm wrong, or that you can take it out on me.  Then again, it's your website, so you can be as much of a nudnik as you want, I guess.
The Tragedy of Mega Man Maker 1.9

Speaking of troublesome people, I later got into yet another fight with the Mega Man Maker community.  Despite working on the update for what felt like an eternity, they finally released version 1.9.0.  It sucked.  There were critical bugs everywhere, certain things no longer worked as they should, the example levels were pretty lackluster (as always), and worst of all?  They pushed out, like, five revisions in one day.  You know, this is exactly why people delay their game releases for a time.  Just… get it right.  Get better feedback.  And get your act together, for crying out loud.

This, incidentally, also killed my motivation to make any more videos for the year.  Once I pushed my two rant videos out - one of which was utterly embarrassing and explained nothing - I was done.
Chatting with AI

Let's discuss AI for a moment - specifically, chat AIs.  As the story goes, a child who wasn't supposed to be using a chat AI service got into an unhealthy relationship with a 'bot over on Character AI.  It ultimately led to the child leaving this mortal coil.  When this happened, it opened the floodgates to lawsuits.  None of them are going to stick due to the funny way the Terms of Service are worded, but it's funny to watch all the sparks fly.

However, it's not all chuckles and grins.  Because of things like this, Character AI, as a company, removed waves and waves of copyrighted characters from their archives, then later implemented very harsh restrictions on that users under the age of 18 can and can't do.  The community didn't take this well and continues to fight amongst themselves.  Meanwhile, I'm still flirting with recreations of my favorite fictitious characters no problem.  Such is life, I suppose.
Minecrafter Alleges to Sue Minecraft for Petty Reasons

Alright, so, one last topic of interest.  There's this turbo-nerd who lives an irradiated basement, and he wants to sue Mojang AB for three major reasons: hiding details of terms of service from users, retroactively punishing users for breaking said uncertain terms, and shady business practices regarding in-game purchases.  It's… stupid.  Really stupid.

At the time of this video, this idiot has somehow gotten over 6,000 gullible users to donate about 1.4 Million Swedish Krona - about $140,000.00 US Dollars - so he can hire a lawyer to take Mojang to court because Minecraft "ticked him off".  I watched his little video…  Basically, he was going to open up a pay-to-win "gun server", but then he got wind of a silent change to the Terms of Service that stopped him cold. The dude wasted thousands of US Dollars to get Twitter Gold Status for his server's account, not to mention whatever money he sunk into the server itself, only to suddenly decide not to risk getting blacklisted on the official server list. I don't even know what to say to that other than "tough noogies".  He could have made his server a "pirate server" and still potentially made bank.  But I digress

I did some digging after the fact and it turns out that, surprise-surprise, Mojang has clever wording in their Terms - basically, an "escape clause" - which states that they "may change this EULA from time to time", and they will "inform you of the change before it takes effect".  This completely invalidates his argument that the silent ban on guns in May went against the Terms of Service and Commercial Usage Guidelines as server owners were, indeed, informed beforehand despite the Terms not being updated to reflect this.  That aside, they basically say in the Usage Guidelines that anything they feel may harm the Minecraft brand can be banned at any time they feel like.

So… yeah.  I have no words for this situation other than "good luck, buddy".  Best case scenario if he goes through with it?  They pay him off with "nuisance money" and he completely changes his tune.  Worst case scenario?  Mojang's parent company, Microsoft, gets involved and counter-sues him for defamation and slander, and he goes ultra-bankrupt.  Either way, I'll be laughing.
The Grandest of Betrayals

Finally, there was one more act of betrayal that no many people seem to know or care about - and with good reason.  The person who betrayed them isn't very reliable and just kind of does their own thing whenever and however they please.  And that act of betrayal… was from me.

At the beginning of 2024, I promised more streams, and I promised to stream on my gaming channel.  I ended up streaming all of eight times that year.  Four of those were writing streams, as opposed to my usual gaming content, and none of them happened on my gaming channel!  I actually released a kind of half-apology, half-explanation in the middle of the year - which is very unusual for me to do.  Even so, I made a promise and broke it.  Needless to say, I'm not doing that again, this year.  If I stream, I stream.  I considered streaming Chrono Trigger for the new year, but ultimately decided against it because I'm a coward who doesn't want to sink that much time into live entertainment.  Seriously, that's about it.
In Closing

2024 was… a negative year for me, if it wasn't obvious.  I didn't get much done, I couldn't commit to any one video game for more than a day, I lost interest in streaming, writing, art… everything.  I'd like to hope that since I'm starting fresh in 2025, I'll find the inspiration to actually get some things done like I used to, but as I get older, I find myself being more and more paralyzed by what I could do.

"Should I game?"  "Should I draw?"
"Should I write?"  "Should I make music?"

90% of the time, I end up sitting on my butt and watching videos on YouTube or diving deep into some nonsensical roleplay with a chat AI…  It's very discouraging and doesn't work well for me as I already have very poor time management skills.  Even this very thing you're reading (or watching on YouTube) was made at the very last possible hours. (It's 10:50 PM EST as I write this specific aside.)  I just… don't know what happened to me, this year.  Was it all the demoralizing stuff?  Or, is my disinterest in life finally taking over, leading me to turn into a couch potato?  Hard to say.  Hard to say what the future holds, too.

Well… here's hoping 2025 turns out to be more productive for me.  Sorry for all the negativity, too, but I had a lot to say - more than I assumed I would, in fact.

Hope your 2024 was more interesting than mine.

Thanks for reading and/or watching,
J