Happy new year from me in Scotland to you! 
And everyone else in ta's hangout. I hope you have a lovely 2025 when it arrives for you! 
warning: politics ahead
who would’ve guessed that people whose entire ideological and political platform is built around hatred of minorities, especially a strong dehumanisation of immigrants as the purveyors of the supposed “destruction” of your country and almost all of its ills would turn on a south african billionaire immigrant who bought your country’s incoming president with what is essentially pocket change for him after he stopped being a useful non-stop dispenser of misinformation and fearmongering and instead has become a technocratic oligarch who’s only interests lie in ensuring he can make more money and have even less oversight over his companies that are given billions of tax dollars has overstayed his welcome and is now a liability to the true goals and motives of a hateful ideology that simply never actually liked him.
everyone thinks the leopards eating face party won’t eat your face because you’re not like the supposed “others” that they hate, when in reality they’ll eat your face the second you have lost your usefulness.
Merry Christmas from me and all the folks in ta's hangout. I hope you have a lovely day whether you celebrate or not! 
A small list of my favourite albums this year. 2024 has had tonnes of amazing albums and honestly this list is very much subject to change, but yeah, these are all pretty damn good albums imo.
can’t remember if i ever shared this but i made it (i think) a year of so ago for @radi8 for a project they were making for the playdate called playlink. pretty happy with how it turned out since i have never done pixel art lol
"modern pop music is bad" is such an odd argument to me. we currently live in a time where you can find pop music of any kind at the click of a button. you are no longer constrained to just what labels want you to hear on the radio.
"it's all meaningless" is just an odd argument too, one of the biggest pop albums of the year - brat by charli xcx - has pretty raw and vulnerable lyrics, so does the new billie eilish record, there are other artists like twenty one pilots who have wrote songs about heavy subjects and has their biggest hit be about it sucks to be an adult.
also, why can't we just also have fun pop songs that aren't deep? the weeknd isn't gonna win awards for deepest lyrics anytime soon but he has made some of the most infectious pop songs of the 2010s and 2020s. i don't go to dua lipa to learn the meaning of life, i go to her music to dance and have fun.
“it all sounds the same” is also weird, do you think that hozier and sabrina carpenter sound that alike? they both had big hits this year. pop music isn't one thing, it can be rock, electronic, metal (see linkin park and poppy), hip hop (see gnx by kendrick lamar), and so many more things. there's also more experimental kinds of pop music like hyperpop or psychedelic pop. if you want boundary pushing stuff from the pop world i’d recommend imaginal disk by magdalena bay or desire, i want to turn into you by caroline polachek. there's also tame impala.
pop music isn't bad, lighten up a little and have some fun.
piracy is completely okay against large business if they think it’s okay to make ai products that steal from artists and everyone else who contributes to the pool of information found on the internet that ai gobbles up and spits out like a bird regurgitating food for their young.
just saying i still think releasing an ai video generator to the public is a horrific idea, heck, making it at all is just incredibly reckless. we’re still trying to grapple with the tsunami of low quality ai slop images that have infiltrated almost every corner of the internet from search to social media and of course turbocharging misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda into the stratosphere. ai video that is as good as sora is the death knell, it was already becoming difficult to detect ai generated images and text, and now we’re just going to make video as hard to trust. governments won’t be able to react fast enough to control it, nor do i think they care. we still haven’t properly regulated big tech around various things like social media to smartphones. and i simply don’t trust openai, they had all these limits for chatgpt when it launched and yet people jailbroke it numerous times, google told people to put glue on pizza, microsoft thought it’d be a genius idea to record everything you ever do on your computer, adobe decided it owns everything you create and fed it to their ai to vomit out some slop for people on facebook to believe is real. i don’t think sora should exist, the cons massively outweigh and all pros in my view. i get that sora is still limited at the moment, but i simply don’t trust them. chatgpt spat out whatever you wanted by giving a jailbreak prompt. people will work around sora’s restrictions, i don’t think we’ll like the results.
for the Scratch version of my Jaguar refresh, I made a little outro slide with the leaper and me stealing parts of da-ta2. don’t worry it’s totally okay, da-ta2 is a massive dork and deserves it.
