WTF Happened December 2024
Happy New Year! 
This is the eighth recap post, affectionately titled "WTF Happened." This is a monthly news post of sorts. I use
these recaps to briefly cover cool, exciting and also not-so-good and
downright terrible events which happened in and around the past month.
I'll cover things like world news, movies, TV shows, tech, VR, personal
projects (like this blog), cool game releases, and anything I find out
during the month that I personally think is worth mentioning.
To begin, I'd like to remind everyone that the United States of America is going through enshittification... and we're about to start Trump presidency part 2. Trump's first term wasn't pretty, so buckle up, people! We're in for a wild ride. Again.
The month of December is always a fun time for me, and I assume it's a fun time for most American families. It is the month of Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year's Eve. If you have birthdays to celebrate, the month is basically booked solid with family and friends. It's the month of gift giving and celebration. We're celebrating making it through another year, which is about as worth celebrating as a birthday, and Christmas is so widely popularized that it's normal to have gift exchange parties and dinner parties throughout the month just to make sure you get to see all your friends. It's just an exceptional month for parties in general.
There was a lot of news to cover for this month that wasn't even Christmas-themed, but a lot of it could be (political) party-themed, so let's get through the most important notes first. Later, we'll also cover some entertainment.
Oct 1st 1924 - Dec 29 2024
First, on December 29th, 2024, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter passed away at the ripe old age of 100. It's actually impressive for a human to last that long, so I'm not surprised by his passing, but what did surprise me was how President elect Donald Trump genuinely seemed to respect the old man. I was also surprised to learn that the current President Joe Biden was picked by Carter almost 2 decades ago to deliver his eulogy. That's insane timing!
Jimmy Carter was widely regarded to be "a better man than a president" (The Independent 2009). I personally think his presidency was fair, and he was honest to a fault. Even during his presidency, he had times when he would lament at how our government is run. He accomplished a lot in his life, and he deserves respect in death, but more so, he deserved greater recognition while he was alive. Sure, some people cared about him, but I'm sure a lot of Americans knew nothing about him until they heard of his timely demise. That's not how we as a society should operate. We should celebrate people while they're still around to appreciate the praise!
On that note, praise be to Biden and his administration for trying to spend their remaining aid budget before Trump takes office and potentially bails on such aid promises. They did a lot to help Ukraine, giving over $62 billion in aid to their war efforts. (AP) I'm anything but knowledgeable about what's going on over there, but I know I don't want Russia to have their way with Ukraine. More should be done, not less.
In social media news, there was a mass exodus from the site formerly known as Twitter to Bluesky. It took some convincing to get some people to make the move, but I managed to convince a few people to jump ship or at least ride the seas on multiple rafts. I managed to get Zimtok5 to come over, which was probably my biggest personal win this month... but I convinced a few random game devs and brand accounts to come over as well. It's sad I had to be the one to convince them all, because I thought I was the one being slow to move over this whole time, having been an inactive BSky member for almost a year before a couple months ago.
BSky has been making a lot of advancements as a platform very quickly recently, too! App version 1.96 introduced some major changes to how the domain-based names work, allowing a user to reserve their non-domain/@bsky.social username when switching to a custom domain so nobody can take the old name and pretend to be the old account. This version also introduced the mentions tab. Later, on December 25th, BSky rolled out its Trending Topics tool in the right side feeds navigation menu.
In Twitter/X fails, we have yet another bizarre change on December 5th, 2024:
Of course, I didn't substantiate this news, because I didn't really know how. Edit feature was a premium X feature, and I refuse to give them money... or engage with their website more than I have to. I've moved on from that dumpster fire, and you should, too!
In a weird twist, Trump got really bothered about "president Musk" trending on social media:
Musk has been bothering a lot of people, not just his own president-elect but other world leaders as well. For example, "German chancellor Olaf Scholz took a thinly veiled swipe at Elon Musk on Tuesday, using his New Year’s address to criticize the tech billionaire’s involvement in the European country’s upcoming parliamentary elections." (Huffpost) I honestly don't have a bet on this race, but it's a good example of history trying to repeat itself if you know what I mean.
Unlike the U.S., Namibia is not afraid of a female president. Namibia voted in their first female president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, on December 3rd with a majority 57% of the vote. I have read a lot of bad things about Namibia over the years, like their high poverty rate, so I hope this is a sign that their country is on the rise and bouncing back from their worst times. Good luck, Namibia!
Back in October, the first female president was elected in Mexico as well! Good luck to her as well!
In space news, we have a probe entering the sun's orbit for the first time! It'll be attempting to solve the mystery of solar winds. (Ars) I'm pretty sure the winds I keep hearing aren't solar-powered, though. They're gas-powered... if you know what I mean. Anyway, this is a pretty big accomplishment just to send the probe so close to the sun in the first place, but we can be hopeful that this experiment will yield scientific discoveries which may lead to further scientific advancements. This kind of study helps us not only to understand the cosmos better but to also figure out engineering challenges which may help us again in future endeavors.
The company named Goodwill is beginning to incorporate VR technologies
into their job training programs, starting with the Georgia locations. (AJC)
The pictures I've seen include some welding exercises and van/truck
driving exercises. The truck rig was nothing special in my opinion, as
most of that was just props and non-VR-specific racing/driving hardware,
something the average consumer could buy. However, the welding stuff
sounds very promising as a way to get more skilled workers into really
useful careers.
Apple was in talks of a partnership with Sony to provide PSVR2 controller options for the Apple Vision Pro. (GeekNewsCentral) It's unclear if this will bare fruit or not, but it seems like a match made in heaven. Imagine using PSVR2 controllers with a wireless headset! PSVR2 controllers are pretty good build quality despite the PSVR2 headset being a tethered garbage bin, so I'd recommend they go through with this partnership. Maybe Apple could help Sony create a new portable PlayStation VR3 later on.
Pimax reportedly has plans to release an ultralight VR HMD called the Pimax Dream Air. The most unique feature of this new headset will likely be its rumored auto-tightening headstrap. This HMD will ship first units May 2025 at the price of $1900 USD. (RoadToVR)
@AtomBombBody posted a BSky thread about Christmas holiday-themed VR game updates. It was quite the fun read and showed off a lot of interesting winter holiday updates for a wide variety of titles, mostly stuff on Meta's platform but a few cross-platform titles as well.
From November 30th to December 3rd, the Godot XR game jam took place, and I was quite impressed with some of the entries, but there weren't a lot of entries in this jam, so I hope the community keeps growing and gets much bigger by the end of 2025 so the next jam gets way more entries. Maybe I'll take part in the next one... or I could at least be a judge.
If you're into game jams, here's another one that just started and runs until February 2025: Gaming Like It's 1929
Oh, did I mention the above game jam is a celebration of new public domain material? The Skeleton Dance is now public domain, so you could make a game based on it and it would be possible to sell it! Go for it!
I tried something new-to-me this month: Cinemark's D-Box seats. They're basically motion sim chairs synchronized to the movie with tons of tiny nodes in the back and bottom of the seat to add some massage style wave-like sensations to some movements. It's actually quite well implemented. The seats are comfortable with an intensity slider on each chair's right side. If you're not stomaching the experience, you can turn it off easily. My first experience with D-Box was Sonic 3, which released to U.S. theaters December 20th, 2024. I will admit it wasn't the best possible use case for these chairs, but the experience was pretty impressive for a very modest upcharge per ticket. I highly recommend trying D-Box with high octane action thrillers and mass destruction movies. I'll be spending my free Fandango Fanclub tickets on D-Box seats before they expire!
The official trailer for the upcoming Superman movie was released December 20th, 2024. Here's the video:
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew began its first season on December 2nd and proceeded to trickle out a single episode every Tuesday since. It seems like a good child friendly side story based loosely in the Star Wars universe, but it has little to do with anything Star Wars. Remember Disney's attempt at a Star Wars hotel? It feels a bit like that but way more affordable. Anyway, it's Star Wars-esque enough for me, and I've enjoyed the first few episodes. Crossing my fingers about its ending being even remotely interesting.
Piggybacking on the Christmas break, we got Squid Game season 2 on Netflix on December 26th. The plot was a direct continuation from the end of season 1, which ended on a pretty satisfying cliffhanger. Unfortunately, season 2 only got 7 episodes rather than 9 like season 1, and it felt a little bit rushed because of this. The ending of season 2 was also another cliffhanger, and this time, it wasn't as satisfying. It basically acts as a middleman for season 3, assuming we'll get season 3 someday, so my advice is to wait for season 3 to have a release date before even starting season 2. However, season 1 felt like it could stand alone. It's a bit like the first The Matrix film in the sense that it ended on a satisfying cliffhanger that didn't feel like it cut out any important story beats and gave you a good what-if scenario to ponder on, so if you haven't seen season 1 of Squid Game yet, just go ahead and watch it... assuming you're not squeamish toward murder thrillers disguised as game shows.
Secret Level released December 10th on Amazon, but I must confess I forgot it was coming out and got too busy to watch it. I do want to see it seeing as I'm the biggest gamer I know, but this show definitely didn't excite me in the way that Skeleton Crew and Squid Game excited me. It's just a bit too random for its own good from the looks of it, but I'll give it a try someday soon. If you've watched it, let me know what you think.
Another show I've yet to taste but came out recently is season 3 of "Marvel's What If...?" I watched seasons 1 and 2 and enjoyed a lot of it. Some of the episodes were kind of "out there", though. I honestly want to see season 3, but I'm going to hold off on this show and watch it with my wife over the course of the next month or so. We both love the MCU and treat the movies in this franchise like sport events in the since that we get hyped up and go to a huge theater and watch them with a large crowd and then proceed to argue about the movies for hours... if by argue, you mean agree about almost everything.
The one new release game this month which truly caught my eye was Murky Divers. It was in early access for a while, though, so it feels more like an update than a new release at this point. Still, I haven't played it much yet, and I'm excited to get a group together for it. It is only $5.99 during the Steam Winter Sale, but even at normal price, it's cheap.
Okay, so that's not entirely true. I also had a few VR new releases on my radar. I bought Clone Drone In The Hyperdome, and it was pretty epic at first. It quickly became disappointing, and once I beat the very short story, I had no desire to continue playing. There have been frequent large updates to the game since release, though, so I'll revisit this title soon.
Obviously, that's not all the shows, movies, and games which came out this month. I'm not trying to cover everything. Hell, I'm not even covering everything I find interesting. I'm just pointing out the shows and movies I thought were most noteworthy for the month. There's so much entertainment coming out on a regular basis these days that no one man can even keep up with it. We truly live in amazing times.
Unfortunately, even in such amazing times, we sometimes still have to endure easily avoidable hardships. Puerto Rico citizens are dealing with mass power outages as a result of poorly maintained power grids. (Liza Hearon) This was due to these power grids being privately owned rather than controlled by government. Such a thing as electricity is considered a public utility in U.S.A., but even so, we still get some temporary outages from time to time. Downtime is avoidable, though, and we should do everything in our power to not take that power for granted.
That's all for this month's happenings! I hope you all had a great Christmas assuming you celebrate this holiday at all, and I also wish you all a great start to the new year of 2025. I'll have a full 2024 news recap put together soon!