HomeWeekly News Roundup (New Years Day Edition)
Happy New Year! Hello from the 2012 side of the world, Australia being one of the first countries to go over to the other side, but you’ll all join me soon enough, whether you like it or not. Having experienced about 18 hours of 2012, I have to say that it has been pretty boring so far. No cataclysmic events yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
I guess it would be customary, at the end of the year, to review the just ended orbit around the sun and summarise the major events. But that would require actually remembering what happened, all year, when I can barely even remember writing last week’s WNR. It should also be a time to look forward to the brand new, still in shrink wraps, year, and make some bold predictions about 2012. But that would require insight and imagination, both of which are in short supply in this 36C (97F) heat.
With the award season upon us soon, I guess I can format this WNR “a look back” in similar fashion, but without spectacular musical numbers, or comedic writing. So basically an award show without any of the interesting bits. Or any actual awards. Sounds like a great idea!
There has been many deserving winners of the prestigious Loser of the Year award, from Sony’s PSN SNAFU, to recent events involving GoDaddy being pwned by Reddit, but there can only be one winner, and of course, it’s Righthaven. The group that helped to redefine the term Copyright Troll has had a horrible year, not only losing court cases, but eventually their shirt (and domain name), as the company is now on the verge of bankruptcy. Will they still be around to compete for next year’s award. Doubtful.
SOPA: winner of our Villain of the Year award
Competition for the always popular Villain of the Year award has been fierce this year, as individuals and companies fight to be total d*cks (hint: not “docks” or “ducks”), in the field of copyright, gaming and beyond. But this year’s award winner is neither an individual, nor a company (and it’s not a duck either). It is, of course, SOPA. The always controversial Stop Online Piracy Act stormed to a clear lead in the voting for the award, at the very last minute I might add. SOPA has managed to unite all against it, be it the conservative Heritage Foundation, Republican as well as Democrats, and even the sworn blood enemies, Reddit and 4chan, and that’s quite an achievement.
The Best Blu-ray of the Year award goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mainly because it was split into two parts and both parts still managed to not only get released in the same year, but both also topped the sales charts. Star Wars just misses out due to a point deduction for George Lucas being a total d*ck (hint: not a duck, named Howard or otherwise).
Skyrim wins our Game of the Year award, for wasting time that could have been used to cure diseases and save the planet
The Best Game of the Year should probably go to the best seller, which would be Modern Warfare 3, but that wouldn’t be fair to the game that everyone is talking about. The amazing world of Skyrim has drawn in thousands of gamers, most of whom have spent hours upon hours arrowing people, and assorted creatures, in the knee, and as a result, the game would have been responsible for breaking up thousands upon thousands of relationships if only gamers actually had real life relationships.
And finally, the Hero of the Year award goes to, in a lame effort to appease my readers, You! For helping to fight SOPA and to punish companies for not agreeing that SOPA is the worst thing to happen to the Internet since Rickrolling, for not buying into the Ultraviolet hype that, I have to admit, I was sucked into when I first heard the phrase “your movie library in the cloud”, for putting up with Sony’s PSN outage and that $600 invoice for adult toys that hackers charged to your credit card account when your details were stolen from PSN, for fighting the likes of Rigthhaven and the US Copyright Group and actually winning, and most courageously of all, for keeping on reading the WNR, rant after rant. You’re a deserving winner!
And as you can probably guess by now, it wasn’t exactly a very newsworthy week. The only real notable piece of news was the GoDaddy anti-SOPA boycott, which Digital Digest was proud to join in, having moved 22 domains out from GoDaddy. It would be easy to feel sorry for GoDaddy right now, as there’s almost nothing they can do or say to repair the damage caused by their ill advised support for SOPA in the first place – even their statement of “we oppose SOPA” was attacked by people claiming the company was opposing SOPA for the wrong reasons (not because SOPA is bad, but because GoDaddy was losing money because of supporting SOPA). Namecheap, hosting the Move Your Domain Day event by offering discounted, below cost domain transfers out of GoDaddy, also managed to raise $64,180 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $2 for every domain transfer – not bad work for a day, considering how much of a pain moving a domain (especially an active, website hosting one) is.
And that was it for the week really, so I probably shouldn’t babble on any further, especially on a day most of you will be nursing hangovers of varying degrees. So there’s nothing left to do except wish you a great new year, a prosperous one, a safe one, and one that’s heaps better than the awful, awful, 2011. See you next week.