WTF Happened February 2025
April Fools! This is the second month of WTF Happened 2025 Edition! The February news recap is arriving a whole month late! I can blame this on a joke, right? Right? Right. Definitely not laziness. Nope.
Whew, man, 2025, that's the future! It feels like I've been alive a hundred years and "seen some shit," but I honestly look back on a lot of it with nostalgic feelings. Even the bad times seem not so bad compared to today. I feel like we're in a downward spiral as a world society! I want to help myself and you dig ourselves out of any depression by focusing mostly on good news and things we can look forward to. Unfortunately, that means we have to wade through the shit first. Stay a while and listen read!
Elon Musk spoke to a camera crew at the Oval Office with Trump and said some things which sounded ridiculous to a bunch of people but a good portion of what he said was actually true! For example, there is a mine. A variety of paper records are stored there. The mine became home to the U.S. government in the 1970s. "As of 2014, multiple administrations had already spent at least $100 million over 30 years in automating efforts." (Source: USA Today) This isn't so bad of news, but it was a sign of people stooping to their level and calling BS on true things instead of focusing on the bad things mixed into said truth. Musk mentioned "deregulating America" several times and at the same time as he said he should be corrected when he's wrong, he doubled down on the 50 million condoms comment they were talking about. He seems to be sincere about some of his concerns about the federal budget, but it also seems to be a blanket excuse to abuse power in multiple ways. We should hold people accountable for their misbehavior, including the president and his cabinet.
Trump told NASA to remove mention of women in leadership roles (Yahoo!) and encouraged various organizations to remove information about anything related to the LGBTQ community, including removing mention of HIV and possible treatments (NPR).
An indictment on a 22-year-old hacker was unsealed on February 3rd for allegedly stealing $65M from DeFI in 2021 and 2023. (Ars Technica) To me, this is a morally fine thing to do, because he worked the system the way it was designed. It's not really his fault these giant pools of cryptocurrency went unprotected for years. He was just smarter than the system, and we should be rewarding him for his ingenuity and math skills, not punishing him for others inability to design a mathematically sound monetary system.
On February 7th, A Canadian woman lost both her hands trying to photograph a shark. (Newser) If she had gotten the pic, I would argue it was possibly worth the sacrifice... because it's not my hands! 
This reminds me of a shark story from a decade ago where a surfer dude lost both his hands in a similar situation except he wasn't purposefully baiting the shark for a photograph.
Mid February, Texas was reported to have doubled their Measles cases! (Ars Technica) Measles has since spread across the United States as fast as possible despite it being a really old disease we handled many decades ago with a vaccine. What can I say? Americans AKA United States-ians are really dumb-ians.
Igloo, a company known for their coolers, recalled ~1M coolers due to a design flaw paired with a faulty part that caused amputations! (Newser) Apparently, they designed a way to keep your severed limbs on ice!
Skype
had a rich history as a messaging service/app going as far back as August 29, 2003, and it was one of the
first video call providers way back in May 2010. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011. On February
28th, Skype's "Goodbye Skype, hello Teams" modal was shown. I didn't see this modal until April 1st, so I almost shrugged it off as an April Fools joke!
The modal announcing Skype's replacement, Microsoft Teams, gave users two options: choose to migrate to Teams or export data. They could choose to use Teams and all their chat info would get migrated over to the other platform pretty easily. Unfortunately, the migration option presented a couple major issues and some minor headaches. My Skype identity was 100% disconnected from my Microsoft account identity. When I migrated, I ended up combining the identities without even a warning. This ended up outing my personal email and real name to several scammers I otherwise would have been anonymous to. There were also some account ties I had to remove/disable to preserve my anonymity going forward.
Egg prices rose significantly in February and continued to have shortages primarily due to a wave of bird flu that hit the States hard toward the beginning of January (ABC). We're still suffering from this flu and egg shortages over a month later, and the flu has had at least 2 instances of human hospitalizations and 1 reported death among 17 affected states (CDC, also CDC). We're also seeing a measles outbreak grow with 9 states being hit by February 27th with one death already reported (CDC). That's the makings of a scary flu season, and we should all take notice and take precautions. Get caught up on your vaccinations and stock your fallout shelters!
Ukraine has taken so much abuse over the past few years, and it's only getting worse!
U.S.A.'s president, Donald Trump, blamed Ukraine's president, Zelensky, for Ukraine's war against Russia, saying "You could've made a deal." (Newser) This is, of course, a ridiculous claim and a downright lie, because Ukraine is not the aggressor; Russia is the aggressor. Zelensky, offered to resign as president of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine's NATO membership after Trump called him a "dictator without elections" (Newser) Trump's behavior toward Zelensky and Ukraine has been nothing short of ridiculous and reminds me of scenes from Mean Girls, and if you need an example scene, I instead refer you to this parody video from Trump's previous term:
I just couldn't help but share that. It puts a smile on my face every time I see it. Now, let's focus the rest of this article on good things we've gotten this month.
In browser news, Firefox got an update that lets you edit PDF files in the browser without any addons! On top of that, it's possible to make new PDFs in Firefox as well! You can now completely bypass Adobe for PDF editing and creation right inside Firefox without any addons! That's amazing. Also, Firefox's translation tool got support for Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Russian was also added as a target language to translate into. (Firefox Release Notes)
In social media news, BSky turned 1 year old February 6th, with well over 30M users! This growth has been amazing, but unfortunately, it was fueled by Twitter's rebrand or death depending on whom you talk to. For that reason, this growth seems bittersweet. On one hand, it's cool to have more people on the platform, but on the other hand, we lost a really cool social network to propagandists and toxicity and now, we have to fight tooth-and-nail to keep the toxic users from spoiling our new haven. Thankfully, there's a lot of really useful tools for handling moderation on Bluesky. Just don't trust the third party labelers out there.
In entertainment news, there were a lot of good movie releases this month! We got a new Marvel movie, Captain America: Brave New World, just in time for Valentine's Day. We also had a first trailer for another upcoming Marvel property, Fantastic Four: First Steps, on February 3rd. I went to the Captain America movie on Valentine's Day with my wife, and we really enjoyed it, but it was a bit lackluster in terms of MCU importance. You can read my review on Letterboxd if you care. Other new releases included but were not limited to Heart Eyes and Love Hurts. We got a lot of decent movies this month due to Valentine's Day being a huge movie-watching day that drives a lot of release schedules.
During the Superbowl, the upcoming Superman movie teased Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern! Oh, right, there was a Superbowl! Yeah! Sports, go sports!
James Gunn noted "This bowl is a touch down." (BSky) The promo video was captioned "The only bowl I need," referencing the bowl cut haircut.
We also got a new show officially teased with a trailer from the creator of Cowboy Bebop! The show is titled Lazarus and will finally air on April 5th on Adult Swim's category on the streaming platform formerly known as HBO. (Gizmodo) You know Max, right? Well, they host the Adult Swim shows nowadays. It's really weird for an old Toonami nerd like me to see a whole TV channel that was the only reason I watched TV become part of a streaming platform that isn't at least cartoon-themed.
In gaming news, there was a lot of new game releases in and around February, but I personally thought the biggest highlight was Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth's PC port on January 23rd. There was also a port of PS5's Spider-Man 2 to Steam/PC on January 30th. Inside of February, we saw Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Sid Meier's Civilization VII, R.E.P.O., Monster Hunter Wilds, and some really big RPG release titled Avowed, which ended up being a huge embarrassment for Obsidian. On the tail end of the month, we saw a free-to-play shooter release on March 6th titled Fragpunk, which I am personally interested in but haven't tried yet.
Unfortunately, we also had some recent big game releases delisted from Steam due to their publisher closing their doors. The games from Roll7, including OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome, were delisted at the end of January. (PCGamer) I loved Rollerdrome and played it at release on my Twitch stream for 2 whole viewers.
In VR news, on February 8th, Civilization VII was announced for Meta Quest 3/3S! (RattyTattySoup on BSky) This was the biggest announcement in February as far as I was concerned. I probably won't play it, mind you.
SteamVR games released in February which are worthy of note include Death Horizon: Cyberfusion, All On Board!, Workshop Simulator, One True Path Part 1, and Against. I already own most of these games from months ago due to either my curator status or influencer status, but one I don't yet have that I'd like to give a try someday soon is All On Board!, because I've always wanted to experience board games in a virtual environment but nothing ever truly replicated the experience in an intuitive way. I'm hoping All On Board! does the board game experience justice, but I'm giving it a few months for its content to mature.
A tool for SteamVR titled Space Calibrator was released on Steam February 14th, and it seems like a decent workaround for users who want to use multiple vendors' standalone devices together with base station tech. I'm going to try it out soon with my Quest 3 and Vive Trackers.
In game development news, we had some new Humble Bundle offerings for Unreal but not much else of note. I will admit I spent most of February focused more on web development projects than game development, so I may have missed some stuff. However, it was a very dry month for Unity and a mostly dry month for Unreal. Godot's asset library also had a bit of a lul with only a few minor template updates, but all of February was spent leading up to the exciting March 3rd release of Godot 4.4.
OK, so that's the month of February 2025. It may seem dark and gloomy, but that's all the more reason to praise the sun! Enjoy the good things in life when and while you can, and fight back when those good things are threatened.