2024 Year in Review, I Guess

I stole this idea from a hacker catgirl.

December 23, 2024
Category: Funny
Content Warning // Politics (World), Language

It's the end of 2024, ain't it? The holidays are almost here and everyone's busy Christmas shopping or heading to visit family, if they have it. Lucky for me, I finished my shopping and have been home for a week by now so here's my list of cool or funny things that happened this year, in no particular order.

Bruh Moment of the Year

South Korean prime minister Yoon-Suk Yeoi establishes martial law that lasts all of six hours, all because the liberal party was planning on an impeachment campaign. He got impeached anyway.

Honorable mentions:
- United States Democratic Party shows no effort to combat fascism;
Leopards Eating People's Faces party has a delicious meal.
- McDonald's worker who gave the FBI a tip on Luigi Mangione unable to recieve $50,000 USD reward.
- Judge (presumably paid-off) blocked The Onion's acquisition of InfoWars.
- Sony spends $200 million USD on production of Overwatch clone named Concord, game dies immediately after launch and is pulled from shelves and stores.
- Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger starts praying live on Twitter;
retires months later and Moore's Law kicks in leading to Intel's number of CEOs doubling every two years.
- The PlayStation 5 Pro.
- The entire IT sector of the world suffers Windows Blue Screens of Death in July, related to a buggy update in CrowdStrike Falcon. Many systems required re-imaging in order to function again.

Customer Data Leak of the Year

Chat logs and personal information on 800,000 users of Andrew Tate's "online university" dubbed The Real World, formerly Hustler's University gets leaked.


Honorable mentions:
- Internet Archive gets taken out for an entire month, user data leaked. Hacker trolls adminsitrators that entire month. Salutes to you, mysterious Keyboard Cowboy, for forcing them to beef up their security in a time of rising fascism.
- The Heritage Foundation, one of the several purveyors of christofascism in the United States, gets hacked by gay furries. Mike Howell is asked about his opinions on vore.
- 95 million records from various French companies and services get leaked. lmao.

Source Code/Development Leak of the Year

Game Freak suffers massive data breach caused by an admin credentials file that was left exposed.
SVN repositories, beta builds, and other things leak, such as:
- Pokémon Black & White 1+2 SVN repositories
- Pokémon HeartGold & SoulSilver SVN respository
- Pokémon Platinum SVN repository
- Pokémon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon SVN repositories
- Artwork source files
- Detective Pikachu film documentation
- Incomplete source code to Pokémon X & Y
- Design documents for games and anime
- Pokémon Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire interal dev wiki
- Various builds of games and tools
- PoC build of Pokémon Legends: Arceus for Switch and Windows
- Pokémon: Let's Go Pikachu! / Eevee! git repos, no assets
- many, many more things


Honorable mentions:
- Rayman 2 Beta Version for Windows
- Builds of Call of Duty: Future Warfare (18 Dec 2011 - 8 Jan 2012)
- Half-Life 1 animation source files
- MS-DOS 4.00 Source code
- DuckTales Remastered source code (part of the WayForward Purchase)
- AMD 4800S main firmware ROM and efuses
- TimeSplitters 4 Internal pitch demo
- Portal: Still Alive debug XEX+PDB for Xbox 360
- Many, many builds of Windows
- Early and Final trailers for 2017 LEGO James Bond pitch

Exploit of the Year

CVE-2024-3094, an exploit caused by malicious code implanted into XZ Utils. Discovered only because someone with superhuman senses was able to detect the slightest startup delay and bisect it.


Honorable mentions:
- CVE-2024-3400: Palo Alto command injection
- CVE-2024-30051: Privilege escalation in Windows DWM
- CVE-2024-38021: Remote Code Execution in Microsoft Outlook
- CVE-2024-6387: Remote Code Execution in OpenSSH
- CVE-2024-9680: Use-After-Free in Mozilla Firefox
- CVE-2024-7589: Heap Overflow in VMware vCenter
- CVE-2024-20329: OS Command Injection is Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances
- CVE-2024-3272: Command Injection and Backdoor in 92,000 D-Link NAS devices

Music I Listened to of the Year

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Original Soundtrack. Has loads of great beats, both lyrical and instrumental, funky fresh and hip-hop.


Honorable Mentions:
- The Joke-Explainer 7000's Highest Quality Rips: Sunrise / Sunset
- Scrappy412 - Deep Blue but it's Elevator Jazz
- nanka - Roots of Ruin (LSDj Cover)
- Shoji Meguro - Iwatodai Dorm (Persona 3)
- Masato Nakamura - Chemical Plant Act 2 (Sonic Generations)
- kfaraday - On the Road
- TristEndo - Tupac eats pizza and rolls blunts
- Nightmargin - On Little Cat Feet
- Keitarou Hanada - Bring it On (Like a Dragon Gaiden)
- Jiko Music - GET INVOLVED (Beta Mix)
- ludosmo - ねえ (Dr. Wily Version)
- Linkin Park - Don't Stay
- Hidenori Shoji - Renewed Unrest (Yakuza Kiwami)
- VA - Body That (MADWORLD)
- The Glass Pyramids - My Heart Feels No Pain (Hi-Fi RUSH)
- layo - ramen beat
- layo - hip hop up
- Avith Ortega - Revival of Pacificity
- Akira Yamaoka - Prisonic Fairytale
- Avith Ortega - Bluehæven

Game (That I played) of the Year

Yakuza 0. I played this game at the very beginning of the year, and its heartfelt, emotonal story combined with the batshit insane combat and substories gave me this stupid smile pretty much throughout the whole game. Highly recommended for people who like beat-em-ups and story-driven games.


Honorable Mentions (not all the games I played):
- Prey (2006 & 2017)
- Alice: Madness Returns
- MadWorld (Wii)
- Halo 2
- SIGNALIS
- Wolfenstein (2009)
- The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
- Judgment
- Metal Gear Solid
- Sly Cooper and the Thevius Raccoonus
- God of War "Dad of Boy"
- Silent Hill
- Piglet's Big Game
- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
- Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
- Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse Remastered
- Devil May Cry
- Bayonetta 2
- Peter Jackson's King Kong
- Yakuza Kiwami 1+2
- OneShot (Original + WME)
- Deadpool (2013)

Game (That I Want to Play) of the Year

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Made by MachineGames and running on idTech, this game appears to be a lovely mishmash of The Chronicles of Riddick, Dishonored, Uncharted, and Wolfenstein. It creates an entire new story rather than just re-using the story of Raiders of the Lost Ark or something, and looks like a fun game to play with my dad, we both hate fascists and love Indiana Jones. :3

Movie (That I saw) of the Year

Deadpool & Wolverine
Yes, I know it's a Marvel movie. To be real I don't really give a toss about Marvel these days, but I really like Deadpool's crass and cynical sense of humor and the over-the-top violence.
Still too heterosexual.

Gubernatorial.

Nintendo Lawsuit of the Year

Nintendo of America Inc. v. Tropic Haze LLC
The lawsuit that killed the Yuzu and Citra emulators, since Nintendo is gearing up to release the Nintendo Switch 2. Whether or not the Yuzu developers are at fault here is up for debate, but that doesn't mean that Nintendo's lawsuit wasn't totally full of crap. They just knew that nobody on that team could fight back since they have infinite money.


Honorable mentions:
- Nintendo Co, Ltd. v. Pocketpair, Inc.
- Nintendo of America Inc. v. Keighin (this one's a real banger)