Naughty and Nice ’22: The Year in and of itself

1. Elon Musk Buying Twitter

Twitter, for all of its problems, has remained one of the best social media networks for finding and posting good information quickly, particularly following the good moderation bolstered by missteps after the 2016 and 2020 elections. But that’s all coming to an end now that Elon Musk has purchased the platform to the tune of $44 billion, all because they happened to suspend some of his favorite moronic accounts like The Babylon Bee. Elon has only become more obnoxious since the purchase has gone through, and he’s quickly undoing all the progress the previous owners made. At the rate he and his fellow muskrats are going, it will only be a matter of time before the platform collapses, despite the number of people who need it for work and exposure. Worse, there remains no obvious replacement to scoop up Twitter’s refugees.

2. The Streaming Bubble Is Bursting

Sure, there have been plenty of great shows and movies coming to streaming services over the last couple of years, but let’s be honest: This was never going to last. High-budgeted and high-quality shows have been coming to services like Netflix, Disney Plus, and HBO Max for reasonable prices, but that time is nearing an end. Those services have been operating at financial losses, and companies are now desperate to turn things around to profit and please shareholders. The result of this has involved price increases for nearly every service this year, alongside shows being canceled because of cost-cutting measures. The services aren’t going anywhere, but the “growing pains” period has only just begun — and I’m not talking about a revival of that particular show.

3. The Crypto Burst

It’s not just streaming. This was also the year in which the cryptocurrency bubble floated too far into the atmosphere surrounding Earth and made a barely audible and comical pop. As in, it was only audible for anyone who invested their life savings into crypto after believing it was the way of the pecuniary future, perhaps convinced by a bunch of online scam artists or commercials featuring popular stars who might be in legal trouble. If only anyone could have warned these people about the problems regarding unregulated currency. A shame, really.

4. Warner Bros. Discovery

Yes, the overall streaming bubble is popping, but Warner Bros. Discovery has gone so far beyond that they deserve a category of their own here. Ever since David Zaslav and his former Discovery cohorts have taken over, too many shows to count have been canceled (three just this week), thus diminishing the worth of the once great (and still kind of good) HBO Max. Worse, many of the shows targeted for cancellation happened to prominently feature actors and themes with a history of being underrepresented, targeted towards Black, Hispanic, female, and LGBTQ audiences. They’ve also removed older shows and movies from the service, thus presenting a danger for future preservation. Chances are they aren’t done either, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see this company on the list next year too.

5. The Creeping Rise of AI

A lot of people, me included, have underestimated just how quickly AI is taking over. The biggest deal at the moment has been AI art, the rapid popularity of which has threatened the livelihoods of several artists. AI art has even won awards, and has quickly made it as far as video games. The details in the art are hardly perfect, as the spaghetti-looking fingers and toes can attest, but it’s only a matter of time before the bots get that down too. Even more frightening for some of us here is how AI is learning how to write. The text these programs generated is — and I’m not sorry about this — robotic at the moment, but it again won’t be long before it develops a personality. We’re welcoming Skynet with open arms.

1. The Midterms Weren’t That Bad

There were plenty of predictions suggesting that the mid-term elections in the United States would be horrendous for Democrats, and it’s tough to blame them. The party in power has a history of taking severe losses in the midterms. There were plenty of real-world problems like inflation, rent prices, and gas prices that the voting populace could have blamed them for, regardless of whether they were really responsible for them (they weren’t.) Fortunately, a bigger subset of voters weren’t willing to put the crazier Republican types in office, which led to a better-than-expected result for Democrats. The state of politics in the US is hardly good, but this lowers the chance of the 2024 presidential election being stolen.

2. A Slow Return to Normalcy

The return to a “normal” state following the worst aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic were bound to arrive slowly, thanks to living in a society where too many people never took the virus seriously. But we’re, at least, making progress. It’s still going to take a while thanks to vaccine rates and especially booster rates being too low, not to mention the newfound prevalence of the flu and another respiratory virus primarily infecting children, but the world’s situation is better than it was.

3. A Wealth of Good TV

If you subscribe to a bunch of streaming services, there’s a good chance that there were entirely too many TV shows to keep track of this year. Having three Star Wars shows and three Marvel shows was good enough, but there were other great prestige shows like Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Severance, Better Call Saul, and several more. TV entertainment is at one of the best points in history, and we should enjoy it while we have it given recent streaming turmoil.

4. Ke Huy Quan’s Comeback

The story of actor Ke Huy Quan was previously one of tragedy. He made a name for himself after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, but left the acting world thanks to the lack of roles for Asians. Now that movie studios, particularly those in Hollywood, have listened to the reasonable demands of the Asian community, roles have been carved out for those like Huy Quan again. He made a hell of an impact on Everything Everywhere All at Once, and is set to make them on American Born Chinese and the second season of Loki in the next year or so. It’s a shame he may not return in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but it’s a great career restart.

5. The Space Race Is Fun to Watch, Anyway

There are all sorts of problems with the current space race, particularly about how it’s all funded by capitalism and features the worst capitalists like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos at the center of it. But it’s been fun to watch, especially when they include people as hammy as William Shatner. The space races have nonetheless been good unifying entertainment for most of the country, and good parts of the world.

1. Companies not done with NFTs

NFTs have been on a sharp decline ever since they exploded in popularity in 2021. In fact, it has been nice to not see them promoted heavily on Twitter. That said, a number of corporations arrived to the fad late and insist on pushing these blockchain collectibles on consumers who aren’t interested. A prime example would be Square Enix and their upcoming NFT game, Symbiogenesis. They’re also releasing digital Final Fantasy VII figures in late 2023 which will cost up to $159.99. CNN also got in on the craze back in 2021, but announced earlier this year their service would be shutting down. As of this writing, NFTs are still available to purchase from CNN, which is alarming for a service supposedly being shuttered. Of course, these kinds of shady business practices are common in the world of NFTs and cryptocurrency as a whole. Spend 5 minutes on Web3 is Going Just Great to see how everything in this decentralized business is a hot, fiery mess.

2. Everything Twitter

Things have been a rollercoaster ride for anyone following news about Twitter. It began in April when Elon Musk tried to take over the site by becoming its largest shareholder. He then agreed to pay an overpriced $44 billion for the social media company. In July after perhaps realizing he failed to do his due diligence before the sale, he tried to back out of the purchase. He was promptly sued by Twitter’s legal team to either honor the deal. A trial date was set for late October. In the months leading up to the trial, a former Twitter Security Chief confirmed Twitter lied about the number of bots and amount of spam on the service. During the discovery phase of the trial, Musk’s texts about the lead up to buying Twitter were released by the courts. Shortly afterwards, Musk re-committed to buying Twitter for $44 billion and the purchase became official in late October.
Since then the billionaire has fired multiple top executives, delisted Twitter from the stock exchange, loaded the company with billions in debt, and laid off or saw roughly 70% of Twitter’s workforce quit. Of course the sharp decline in staff wasn’t the end of it. Musk tried to revamp the $4.99 per month Twitter Blue into a $7.99 per month service that allows anyone to be verified, with predictable and disastrous results. Impersonation and real world damage were rampant, and a good number of advertisers pulled their ads from Twitter. (Note that advertisers are Twitter’s main revenue source.) Since then, Twitter Blue has been pulled and relaunched. The accounts of previously suspended users have been restored, including former President Donald Trump. The service has also seen a huge increase in hate speech and over a million users have deleted their accounts to go elsewhere. At this point Musk’s purchase of Twitter seems to be more of a result of him wanting to turn the service into Gab or Parler. At this point, it’s a wait and see on which problems bring the site down, or if it will chug along. Either way, it’s all a big mess. Thank goodness for Twitter is Going Great to keep up with it all.

3. FTX Crypto Going into Bankruptcy

Earlier this year cryptocurrency exchange FTX was on top of the world. Users saw ads for the service running during the Superbowl. Sponsorships and naming rights for stadiums were a thing. Heck, the CEO Sam Bankman-Fried even made the cover of “Forbes” magazine in 2021. The start of November 2022 would see FTX fortunes reverse in a stunning manner. A leaked balance sheet revealing that FTX was involved in trading holders’ finances via its sister company Alameda Research set off a chain of events. Binance, a rival cryptocurrency exchange, exclaimed through its CEO Changpeng Zhao that it was going to liquidate its holdings of FTX’s tokens. Binance then entertained the idea of bailing out FTX, but then changed their minds. After that, there was an attempted bank run on FTX, where it was revealed the company didn’t have all of its depositors funds. Less than a week later Chapter 11 bankruptcy began. Governments in the United States and the Bahamas (where the company was located) began to investigate. On December 13 Bankman-Fried was arrested after criminal charges were filed against him. In the meantime, people have finally begun to question the stability of crypto as the industry learns what the general banking industry learned 100 years ago.

4. Companies Setting Goodwill on Fire

2022 seems to be the year where companies saw fit to burn through goodwill. In March the boutique PC builder, Artesian Builds saw its reputation circle the drain after CEO Noah Katz, mocked a Twitch streamer during a PC build giveaway. People criticized him and the company and the story took off on social media. The company was already on thin ice because of Katz’s terrible management and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a month after the incident.
At the beginning of the year Buzzly.art was an art site that looked like a promising alternative to DeviantArt. For years artists have complained about how little DA cared about its users and how unpopular changes were forced upon people. In late October 2021, Buzzly got started and people generally enjoyed the service. Cracks began to show as the administration couldn’t decide on how the site should be run, especially in regard to content moderation. Users were polled in a passive-aggressive way and the event snowballed into a mass-exodus of users. In many cases, artists went back to DeviantArt, Twitter, and Tumblr. I covered the entire incident on my side blog.
Hive Social had a meteoric rise as a Twitter alternative that was easier to use than Mastodon. However, concerns about the service lacking a desktop version, being iOS only, and having questionable terms of service marked the start of scrutiny for this app. It turns out security measures were severely lacking and the service was only run by a small staff. A huge security vulnerability was discovered and the service was completely taken offline. As of this writing, Hive Social has not been restored on the App Store.

5. Everything Ye

Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kayne West has been in a downward spiral for years. 2022 has been special as he’s burned through all of his remaining fans as he’s courted far right extremists. In October he mocked the Black Lives Matter movement along with right wing provocateur Candance Owens. Later in the month, he spent his time on Instagram and Twitter directing anti-semetic tirades at Jewish people, which caused him to be suspended on both services. Later, brands would finally begin to dump him en masse, including Adidas. He then showed up at former President Donald Trump’s residence to have dinner and brought along far right commentator Nick Fuentes. Ye dug further into the rabbit hole as he professed his love for Adolf Hitler and even appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars. Amazingly, Ye managed to unnerve Jones with his rants. After having his account restored on Twitter by Elon Musk, Ye was suspended again for more anti-semetic remarks. Did I mention Ye is also running for president? Yikes all around.

6. Politics

I don’t even know where to start here and my contribution is already pretty long. So how about a rapid fire?
Russia kicked off 2022 in a hell of a way by invading its neighbor Ukraine at the end of February. Many were expecting Russia to quickly defeat the smaller country, but thanks to a mix of fierce determination and aid from other countries, Ukraine has not only held on, but made gains in its bid to push Russia out of its territory. The war drags on and no one knows if it will end any time soon or worse, expand.
Even as former president Trump seeks another term in office, his legal troubles continue to mount. Missing government documents, civil lawsuits, and tax fraud are the biggest challenges he faces.
In late June the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 federal decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion. The rights went back to the states and laws dramatically vary, with some states immediately banning the practice.
In Britain the country has gone through three prime ministers in a single year. Even a head of lettuce outlasted Liz Truss’s reign.
This year also saw the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September. She had a long life and an exceptionally long reign as the queen. Amazingly, Henry Kissenger keeps on ticking.

1. Interest in NFTs Falls Off a Cliff

About a year ago NFTs were all the rage. It was a craze that many people didn’t understand, but crypto enthusiasts insisted it was the next big thing for artists. Support an artist by buying and investing in an NFT instead of, you know, just commissioning them or buying their merchandise. As quickly as NFTs came onto the scene they began to quickly fade. In February interest in the overpriced image receipts fell sharply. These days most people only hear about NFTs in the context of buyers who had their jpeg receipts stolen, gaming companies still trying to push the concept (and people not buying it), and scams being exposed. NFTs may not be dead yet, but good riddance to a bad craze. Here’s hoping a few lawsuits against celebrities also help further push NFTs to irrelevance.

2. Decentralized Social Media Takes Off

As highlighted in my naughty column, Twitter has had a turbulent year. Having a billionaire eventually buy the social media site caused people to seek out alternatives. In April, people began to explore decentralized social media. It was mainly through the Twitter alternative, Mastodon, a service that was created in 2016. Ironically over fears that a different billionaire would purchase Twitter at the time. This service functions by having federated servers or instances being able to all talk to each other. Each instance has its own rules, its own culture, and its own stance on moderation. Everything depends on volunteers, for better or worse. Of course, this is how the internet used to work before corporations gobbled up community spaces and centralized everything. Since April, the number of active users on Mastodon grew from around 380,000 to over 2.5 million. With the huge influx of users, problems with Mastodon have been brought to light. Namely, how moderation can vary drastically depending on the server, and how covert racism is a problem. The bright spot is that people on the service are actively working to make things better, but the internet is still going to be the internet.
Mastodon is one of the biggest players in the decentralized social media and internet services spaces. Here’s to hoping that people branch out and discover that more alternatives to corporate run services are available on the larger Fediverse.

3. Alex Jones Gets Comeuppance

2022 has been great for seeing Alex Jones, a man who peddles conspiracy theories, finally face consequences for his outright lies. You see, freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom from the consequences of that speech. Jones was sued in Texas and went to trial over the conspiracy theories he spread about the parents of Sandy Hook school victims. Jones put up a defiant front, but his undoing partially came from his own lawyers when they accidentally sent the lawyer representing the Sandy Hook parents two years worth of cellphone data. The lawyer for the parents, Mark Bankston, dropped the evidence in the most dramatic way possible. After the trial ended in October, Jones was ordered to pay $965 million to the families. In November, a Connecticut judge ordered him to pay another $473 million to the Sandy Hook families. Since then, Jones has filed for bankruptcy. Here’s to hoping he can’t wiggle his way out of these payments.

4. Theranos Founders Face Justice

The rich and powerful being made to face the consequences of their own terrible actions just warms the heart, especially at this time of year. A year ago Elizabeth Homes, the founder and CEO of the now defunct Theranos went on trial for the crime of defrauding investors and harming the public. In January, her verdict was handed down by the jury. Guilty on almost all charges. In November she was sentenced to serve more than 11 years in prison. Considering how she was adamant on the fact that she’d never serve jail time because “pretty girls like her don’t go to jail,” the schadenfreude hits hard. Not just because she’s rich and made terrible business decisions, but because people were harmed by her faulty medical devices, arrogance, and greed. Her COO and right hand man, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was also convicted and will serve 13 years in prison for his part in the fraud.

5. NASA Has an Amazing Year

2022 Has been an exciting year for NASA. In July the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were sent back to NASA and released to the public. The details were stunning and offered more insight to the universe than the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally launched in December 2021, it only took 30 days for the powerful telescope to reach its destination and start sending back images and data. It will be exciting to see what the telescope further reveals in the future, as it’s just getting warmed up.

If that wasn’t exciting enough, in September NASA announced it had successfully tested a defense method for deflecting potentially dangerous asteroids. The solution? Ram the large space rock with a spacecraft. Why blow it up, when you can just knock it off course? The catch is that it will take months to know if the mission was successful, and as of this writing it’s unclear if the nudge has completely worked.

6. More Corporate Mergers Blocked

For years corporate consolidation has run rampant in the United States. Heck, I just spent a great chunk of time on Sunday complaining about mergers in the anime industry. So it’s nice to see that the FTC under the Biden Administration has been stepping up to block more mergers. A big one came in November when a U.S. district court judge announced she had blocked the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Had two of the largest book publishers been allowed to merge, the number of large book publishers in the States would have dropped from five to three.
On the gaming side of things, the FTC has filed an antitrust lawsuit to prevent Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard. The deal would allow Microsoft to own and control some of the biggest, most popular franchises in the gaming industry. On one hand, the deal would have gotten rid of Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. On the other hand, media consolidation is rarely good for the consumer. It’s unclear if the lawsuit will stick, but it is nice to see a large corporation like Microsoft not being able to easily buy this huge publisher, especially after purchasing Bethesda in 2021.

1. Right Wing Furries In The News, Furries In The Right Wing News

The furry fandom — indeed, many online groups over the last decade or two — have been the target of far right hate groups, but not in the ways you think. Yes, there are the people who go after those groups in order to criticize and defame them. Furries saw that this year with the ridiculous story of litter boxes being in classrooms and kids being allowed to relieve themselves in them if they identify as cats. Sorry, but no. Outside of some fringe furries who are into doing things with their bodily fluids, the majority of furries, even the ones who identify with feral characters, go to the bathroom properly, the same as every other human. If a child is regularly using a litter box, that’s not being a furry, that’s a sign that something is deeply wrong with their home life and their parents or guardians need to be investigated.

Along with attacks from without, furries have to contend with attacks from within the fandom. Far right hate groups have been attempting to infiltrate and corrupt the fandom, preying upon vulnerable individuals who might feel unloved by society and negatively treated by those around them. It’s easy to listen to someone when they tell you that your problems aren’t your own, they’re caused by some group or another. Illegal Immigrants are taking your jobs, The Jews are taking your money, Black People are doing whatever Black People are doing, Women are keeping you from achieving your goals so they can take positions of power for themselves, and so on. And oh, aren’t those Nazis actually pretty cool people?

Yeah. It stuns me to think that any reasonable person could be made to admire and actually follow the philosophies that Germany’s National Socialist party followed, especially since we as a society never really stopped hating Nazis and being aware of what they did and believed, but then there are people who claim that they only like Nazis for their dress sense.

To be fair, they did dress well, but that’s part of their propaganda.

Over the years, they’ve invaded spaces like the Brony fandom. The “Rarity didn’t know you could burn Jews!” joke should’ve been our first clue, eleven years ago, way back in season two of Friendship is Magic. Furries, as well, have been slowly but steadily recruited to the far right, with groups such as the Furry Raiders being a Nazi group in all but name. These groups will often claim they’re not Nazis and will rebut by showing up in large numbers with assault weapons, as if the very notion of being unmasked as a Nazi is so terrfying to them that they feel the need to intimidate their accusers into silence lest their secret activities be known to all. The Furry Raiders also seem to be copyright claiming YouTube videos that discuss them in a negative light and expose their deep dark secrets.

This year, one such far right fur committed a mass shooting in the United States, in the state of Oregon. He’d been part of the fandom for at least a decade, but I use the phrase “part of the fandom” very loosely. He had often left hateful comments leading to his banning from sites such as Inkbunny, and he’d be kicked out of IRC channels for describing how he was going to murder everyone in the channel. Oregon’s furry conventions didn’t want him there. In essence, he was the perfect person to be singled out by a far right extremist group and provoked to violence. All they had to do was tell him that it wasn’t his fault that he was getting ostracized, even though it very much was. He was an angry young individual who needed help, but instead was fed more and more hate until he erupted and attempted to kill several people.

This isn’t the first time a furry has made the news for an attack, but it seems like this was the year that right wing media decided to run with the narrative that furries are somehow bad and trying to destroy America. At least one other mass shooting was blamed on someone being a furry when they weren’t, and the litter box story spread like wildfire. The litter box story is the latest in a series of misrepresentations of the concept of gender identity; its previous incarnation was the stupid “attack helicopter” joke. The implication was clear: furries and the LGBTQ community were being blamed for everything that was wrong with America, and it was up to gun toting Americans to correct the problem. Three guesses how they were encouraged to do so.

The good news is that for the most part, the threats of violence were only threats, but flashpoints like the shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado in November proved that the hateful rhetoric was working. That, plus a startlingly high amount of legislation aimed at negatively affecting the LGBTQ community shows that the community is very much under attack, and this year the far right has been using LGBTQ’s loose ties to the furry community to try and harm both. It’s very scary for my online LGBTQ friends and it makes me worried for them, wondering if one day they’ll disappear from the Internet, either from fear or due to being the next victim of an attack.

This is by far the most important thing I can talk about this year. The only saving grace is that the severe upswing in threats and violence didn’t stop the majority of LGBTQ people from turning out at the polls to help keep the predicted red wave from happening in the United States midterm elections this year, which was clearly intended to be the outcome of such hatred. Still, the fight for acceptance is definitely not over for the LGBTQ community, and the fight to keep the far right out of the furry fandom is also definitely not over.

2. The Biggest Story Involving The Word “Musk” To Not Involve Furries

The right wing war on furries and LGBTQ overshadowed anything Elon Musk did this year, the biggest of which was his year long power play involving Twitter. From announcing that he was going to buy it, then pulling out of the deal entirely, then apparently having to be forced into it anyway (I somehow doubt that he was truly coerced, the man clearly wanted Twitter, no matter how much disinterest he feigned). Once he had control, he fired nearly everyone, let all the banned right wing extremists back on, and ran the company into the ground. Less than a couple months after the acquisition, people are already speculating on the downfall of Twitter, a platform that no one ever thought could be killed off quite so quickly or completely, and it truly looks as if next year, we’ll be writing about Twitter going off-line completely or shifting into a much different-looking platform.

It has actually happened before, where once big websites like Ustream have turned into very niche things that no one talks about any more, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing were to happen to Twitter. And just like Livestream and Ustream have given way to Twitch and… I guess still just Twitch for now until someone finally comes up with true competition for it, platforms such as Mastodon are rising up in Twitter’s wake to take over for the suddenly floundering platform. This is something that is most definitely still ongoing, and will likely show up on our naughty list next year as well unless something were to change in a hurry.

By the way, as I was writing this, Elon Musk finally blocked the account tracking his private jet, a little more than a month after he promised not to. Never trust anything the man says. I’m actually pretty impressed at how much restraint he showed by waiting a month before getting his way and banning it.

3. It’s Time To Talk About YouTube A Littl-BUY A CAR!!!!!!!!!!!

Last, I’m going to talk about ads on YouTube. It feels like ads on the site have been getting worse this year. Not worse as in the content. Many of the ads look like the same kinds of ads I would see on actual television, although some “ads” look like someone just paid to have one of their videos aggressively pushed to viewers. I’ve hit the skip button on an “ad” that clocked in at nearly an hour, several times today alone. Sometimes I’m forced to sit through an entire ad, but thankfully everything above thirty seconds is able to be skipped after five. Most thirty second ads can be skipped, and even a lot of the fifteen second ads have the Skip button.

Much more than the ongoing security concerns that unvetted website ads bring with them, YouTube is becoming one of the best reasons to have an ad blocker. A very good example of how badly YouTube drops the ball with their ads comes when looking at how they’re handled on a YouTuber named iilluminaughtii’s videos.

iilluminaughtii, real name Blair — which I will be using because it’s easier on me than typing out her channel’s name — makes videos talking about various pyramid schemes and other scams. She is also sponsored and regularly runs sponsorship ads in her videos.

When placing ads on her videos, YouTube has tried to run them at chapter starts, but their placement still breaks the flow of her videos because there’s no natural transition like you might see on an actual television show. This is easily apparent when one reaches the sponsorship portion of her videos and she is able to transition to them in a natural manner and not make it sound obnoxious when she does. YouTube’s ads, though, come after Blair uses language suggesting a transition to the next portion of her video essay and not a transition to a commercial break.

This isn’t unique to Blair’s videos. Other YouTubers will run sponsored ads, like ProJared, r/Slash, and others. There will almost always be a clear transition between sponsored content and the meat of their videos, with the more conscientious content creators segueing naturally to their sponsored content.

Other YouTubers also run videos with chapter transitions, but won’t always make the chapter transitions readily apparent in the videos themselves, intending for them to be more of a convenience to the viewer to skip to certain parts rather than natural breaks in the flow. This causes the ads that appear in those videos to cut the speaker off in the middle of a thought and force the viewer to have to sit through two full unskippable ads, or at least five seconds of a skippable one, before they can return to the video they’re trying to watch. The only way around this is to decide not to monetize the video, but then they’re getting no revenue at all from YouTube, and they can only get away with that if they’re super successful on Patreon.

Do you remember when you used to watch Saturday morning cartoons and the action would stop and you’d have a “Oh no, what’s going to happen next?” moment? The music would reach a crescendo, the protagonists would be in peril and the episode would fade slowly to black and then ABC would play an “after these messages, we’ll be right back” animation. Then, there would be about two or three minutes of commercials before returning to the show.

Other shows have done this, too. Any news program will transition to a commercial break by announcing a story they’re intending to cover later in the broadcast, and sometimes these stories would be discussed in a click bait manner, being hyped up to string viewers along, but being placed close to the end of the broadcast in order to keep everyone watching. As scummy as that practice is, it does help to inform the viewer that they’re going to be watching ads in a moment, so there’s no whiplash for anyone trying to watch the news.

Game shows also regularly break for commercials, and regular viewers of The Price Is Right, Family Feud, Jeopardy!, or Wheel of Fortune know right where the commercial breaks are going to be. Shows like Deal or No Deal did exactly what Saturday morning cartoons used to do, bringing the contestant to a climax moment, pausing the action for maybe a few seconds longer than the contestant can stand, then the host announces that whatever the contestant is waiting for is coming after a commercial break. It got to be such an expected meme that in one episode, a rather flamboyant and fun contestant on Deal or No Deal managed to get the drop on host Howie Mandel by realizing a commercial break was about to be called and announcing it himself.

Ads on YouTube just don’t seem to have that same kind of intelligently presented transition, as I’ve hopefully demonstrated here. YouTube is constantly naughty for a number of reasons, but this year, I wanted to focus on their ad placements in order to round out my naughty list for the year.

1. More Union Stories, But Are You Really Surprised? At Least They’re Nice This Time.

If there’s something you’ve likely noticed about the bloggers on this site during Naughty and Nice this year is that we are very much pro union. We’d be happy if we woke up tomorrow and found out that a lot of industries in Canada and the United States were suddenly unionized.

The fight to form unions is definitely uphill and very much unfair. Unfortunately, as I’ve outlined in prior articles under both the Naughty and Nice banner and others, corporations can and will try to bust up a union, both before and after they’re formed.

This year, a furry named Apollo attempted to set up a union at his Starbucks in Kansas City and faced retaliation from the coffee chain, ultimately resulting in him getting fired. This didn’t stop the store from becoming the first Starbucks in Kansas City to successfully unionize.

Apollo, real name Michael Vestigo, showed up at a rally in Seattle in his fur suit to protest the reason for his firing. He’d been fired for supposedly displaying violent and threatening behaviour, but he showed the crowd his fursuit and asked if he looked threatening to anyone there.

Starbucks, unfortunately, has a long history of union busting tactics, going so far as to actually — and temporarily, since I’m sure they don’t want a repeat of Walmart’s debacle in Quebec — close locations where a union drive is attempting to happen. This is what makes unionizing in major chains such a risky endeavour. A chain might deem it more than worth it to just close the location down rather than allow the union, and a one time judgment is not going to be much incentive if it means they can keep getting away with crushing unions.

The story does have a happy ending because the union drive in Kansas City was successful, and other Starbucks locations successfully unionized this year. But more needs to be done to teach corporate America that they can’t get away with stepping on workers’ rights.

If more workers stepped up and unionized, not only would they have a much better shot at getting a living wage and hopefully a less hostile work environment, corporate America also would be less incentivized to shut down the unionized stores. If all the Starbucks in a city unionize, what are they going to do, pull out of the city entirely?

When Walmart shut down the unionized store in Quebec, they were sending a message that one store was nothing to them, they could just go without that store’s profits if it meant not having to pay those workers fairly or having to deal with their union. If every Walmart unionized, then the company would have no choice but to deal with them.

And it’s not just Walmart. Every store in every chain needs to unionize. Fast food, grocery workers, video game stores, and so on. Chains as big as Walmart and as small as, say, The Grocery People, all need to be unionized so that corporations can be held accountable for how workers are treated. What’s started at Starbucks this year needs to continue in other chains and in other industries. There needs to be similar grassroots campaigns everywhere. Walmart needs to unionize. McDonalds needs to unionize. Big box stores need to unionize. Yes, even small chains like the aforementioned The Grocery People need to unionize.

Here’s hoping for more good news on this front in 2023.

2. Uh Oh, He’s Talking About Jeopardy Again!

I debated about where to put this, but I eventually decided to slot it into the nice column. This was the year that Jeopardy! finally decided who their new host would be. Everyone who has been following the drama since the passing of Alex Trebek knows that they had already decided upon a permanent host last year, only for fans to raise such a stink about it that they changed their minds after five episodes and ended up with another full season of guest hosts instead. Their original choice of successor to Mr. Trebek was Mike Richards, already the executive producer of the show, to which I devoted a series of articles discussing. This unfortunately came at the expense of various hopefuls who were left out in the cold, including long time fan of the show LeVar Burton. Mr. Burton had only been allowed to host five episodes, and it sort of felt like a take it or leave it kind of thing, to offer him not only a very few number of episodes, but also to schedule them during the Olympic Games in order to further lower his ratings. The experience seems to have soured his opinion of the job, and although he didn’t have anything specifically negative to say about the show, he did admit that he no longer was interested in hosting it.

It took far too long for Richards to be let go from the show completely, but he seems to have landed on his feet. He finally got his dream job as game show host, but instead of hosting a nationally syndicated show like Jeopardy!, he has found himself hosting a show on GSN instead. It’s not exactly a badge of honour to host a show on GSN, so hopefully Richards will be another footnote in the world of game show hosts, sort of like how Jerry Springer hosted the GSN show Baggage and had success on the network, but no one really talked about it in mainstream circles, nor did it ever make its way off the network other than into very few foreign markets.

But let’s get back to Jeopardy! and its years-long host crisis. When the shift back to guest hosts happened after the firing of Richards, two of the guest hosts from the original run returned. Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik resumed their duties as guest hosts of the show for an entire season, after which they were offered the job for real. The two hosts will now take about half a season each, and Bialik will host special prime time tournaments as well, an outcome which was likely inevitable, considering no other guest host was brought onto the show after Richards was let go. It was also where I initially thought the show was heading towards when Jennings was a guest host for an extended period of time immediately after Mr. Trebek’s passing. At first it looked like maybe they were going to just let Jennings be the permanent host after a trial period, but I guess Richards had to step in and mess things up.

So this year is finally the year that the answer to the question, “Who will replace Alex Trebek?” has finally been answered. Let’s hope that we won’t ever need to address the problem again, for a long, long, looooooooong time.

3. John Oliver the Otter

Hey, did you know John Oliver has a fursona? Yeah, the furry community were surprised when he suddenly revealed, in a web exclusive segment about the Georgia Guidestones, a picture of an otter fursona, presumably his.

While it is a net positive for the furry community to have someone as outspoken on a number of important issues as John Oliver show solidarity with the community in such a manner, I should also point out that not only were the signs there over a number of years, we also could possibly have realized that we already knew what John Oliver’s fursona was, long ago.

One of the most infamous moments to come out of the 2020 season of Last Week Tonight was a segment where John Oliver wanted to buy a piece of obvious furry rat erotica that had been advertised on a PBS art show many years ago, where the hosts were either willfully ignoring the clear intention of the art or were somehow truly ignorant of what was going on in the pictures, and would show them on screen, uncensored, for anyone in the audience to buy the original of.

The person who bought the specific piece that John Oliver had his eye on contacted the show and sold it to him and he was able to triumphantly hold it up for his audience to see. Well, the home audience. By then, the COVID pandemic was in full swing, and they couldn’t film in front of a live audience, but no matter. He had the art and his quest was complete. Why he wanted a piece of erotic rat art, I don’t think anyone will truly know, but it did come back in later episodes when he got to teach us that there’s a political term called ratfucking, in an episode where he was talking about it. Incidentally, the term refers to the dirty political sabotage of your opponents during an election. Given that 2020 was an election year, you can probably tell where that was going.

We’re talking about otters, though, not rats. Otters were brought up one season prior, when John Oliver did a segment on a Japanese mascot called Chiitan, and the show created a mascot inspired by Chiitan called “Chiijohn”. Chiijohn, like Chiitan, was an otter, which at the time didn’t spark a lot of speculation, but now that John Oliver’s possible otter fursona has been revealed, it does raise some questions about whether or not there’d been such a fursona already and we were only just now finding out about it. Has John Oliver been a furry since 2019 (or possibly earlier)?

True to form, no further word about such a thing has been given yet, and as far as I can tell, even though he mentioned how the furry fandom offers art commissions at reasonable prices, no one has come forward to discuss being the person who drew the art. It’s possible there was an NDA agreement signed, it’s possible the artist just doesn’t want to be identified in order to keep themselves out of the overwhelming spotlight such a thing would carry with it, but it’s also just as possible that the show’s in-house art team came up with the art themselves. Given it’s been months since the segment, we’re likely to never know.