Encapsulating 2012 in a single post

Seeing as how I have absolutely no work to do at work, and haven’t had any work to do at work for the last four business days, I guess now is as good as time as any to do my own rendition of a year in review kind of post. The good thing about being such a dedicated and studious brogger as myself is that it’s easy for me to take a glance back through the year, and see what I wrote to refresh myself of the happenings of the entire year, and not just limit my entire judgment of a substantial period of time based on the events of just the last six to eight weeks.

When I look over the general pace and tone of my posts throughout the year, and just my basic perception of the year as a whole, I have to say that overall, 2012 wasn’t really that bad to me at all. Dare I say, it slightly erred on the positive side of the spectrum. I did a good bit of activities throughout the year, went to many places, had some decent experiences, and consumed a lot of unhealthy crap on the way. I like to think of myself as a pretty easy-going person, and I don’t particularly ask for a gargantuan amount of stuff each year, so I suppose I can believe that my year was filled out pretty nicely without that much negative crap mixed in.

I guess I’ll do this in a highlight reel kind of style, of the things that stood out the most to me throughout the year:

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Does high school anonymity exist anymore?

I was listening to the 2012 Best of the Howard Stern show, and there was a segment about a kid who put out a video on YouTube that sort of went viral earlier in the year, about how he would jack off to the Facebook pictures of all the girls he knew.  Because clearly all the girls that bothered to friend him had, or had their privacy settings set to where he could creep to the slutty pictures that all teenage girls seem incapable of not uploading.  It’s a catchy tune to be honest, and the lyrics are funny, but yeah in the end, the underlying message is still pretty creepy.

When the Stern Show managed to get the kid on the air, it turns out that he’s some dumb teenage black weeaboo into anime, has no friends, and is more or less completely oblivious to the fact that he’s 17 with no inkling of idea what he’s going to do with his future, and absolutely no preparation for what the adult world is going to be like when it comes crashing down on him when he’s done with high school.  And no genuine understanding of that something like this video is never going to be fully erased from the internet no matter if he takes it down or not, and that if the right (or wrong) people find it, it could seriously jeopardize his future prospects in so many varying ways.

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Welp, if this is our last night on Earth

No better way than ending it on a high note, slaughtering the crap out of a bunch of attempted pub-stompers, with the girl that started it all, my one first true LoL love, Miss Fortune.

Not that I believe for a second that it’s the end of the world, but if it were, I can’t say that I really have many substantial regrets.  Maybe that I didn’t accomplish my goal of visiting every single Major League Baseball ballpark, or visiting Astoria, Oregon, and when I didn’t have the sense to ask out the hot girl with the blue hair at Dragon*Con that one year.

Otherwise, I think I’ve lived my life pretty full and decently.

R.I.P. Springfield Mall, 2012

Around this time last year, I went to Springfield Mall, and took a stroll down memory lane. It wasn’t much of a stroll, because 70% of the mall was closed, and the whole place was this cemetery of drywall monuments, where all the stores were like tombs and mausoleums of what was once a bustling place of commerce and social gathering. But at least back in 2011, it was still a place where I could actually go inside, walk around, and reminisce about older times.

The photo above is Springfield Mall as of November 2012.

Springfield Mall, for all intents and purposes, is dead.

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Reflecting on past September 11ths

I was combing through some old bookmarks, and I came across a link to an old convention acquaintance from back in the day, Nikkou. She had some notoriety back then as one of the two people responsible for bringing the infant internets the Anime Web Turnpike, the at-the-time largest weekly updated conglomeration of anime-related links from all facets of anime fandom.

Apparently, a lot like me, she cherished her nerdy friends to to where she would go through the effort to put up some sort of page of reminiscing of past days, going so far as to mention me by name and by an old sketch I had done, portraying an old Otakon web design panel that I was somehow a part of. It was at this panel, or rather afterward, where I would actually meet Nikkou, and she saw it fit to rectify the issue that hadn’t been an Anipike Guest Author, like my peers on the panel. My old collection of links actually exists to this day, on an Anipike classic archive section, which broke on September 11, 2000. To no real surprise, almost 90% of the links I posted 12 years ago aren’t valid anymore, ironically including my own website, which happened to be on a different URL then.

Regardless, this was 12 years ago. 12 fucking years ago.

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Do not want

Since I’m going to be up in NOVA this weekend, so that I can watch baseball, meet Hacksaw Jim Duggan, be reminded of how old as fuck I am at Otakon, meet the Green Ranger, and watch more baseball, I thought about hitting up Malibu Grill, for old times’ sake. The good one, the one in Falls Church, the one that really started it all. Not the one in Fair Lakes, the one that used to be the Bertucci’s where I used to work when I was 16, the one that ultimately ended up turning into half a Chinese restaurant.

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I think I miss The Nabisco Thing

I can’t say I eat a whole lot of Kraft foods.  It’s hard to tell, because apparently Kraft ultimately owns a shit ton of other companies, that I was mostly unaware that were owned by Kraft.  That being said, I read this story recently about how Kraft is rebranding their snack division, and will be soon be called Mondalez International.

The flaw with the statement is that Kraft Foods used the term “snack division.”  Sure, you could technically snack on anything be it an Oscar Meyer hot dog, a glass of Tang, to Kraft cheese single.  But in terms of the traditional snacks of chips, fruit snacks, cookies and crackers, Kraft already has a name for their snack division – Nabisco.

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