CHEERS and JEERS for 2013

And now, dear readers, it's time for CHEERS and JEERS for the end of the year.

Feh to the Obama Administration. Sure, there were bright spots - the peace overtures with Iran, the 24% drop in homelessness among veterans, and the new EPA rules for power plants come to mind. I can forgive the health care debacle as a substantial but temporary setback. The problem I have with this administration - have always had with this administration - is that the President simply doesn't care about the Fourth Amendment. That's what makes the Snowden revelations so devastating to him.

Double CHEERS to Edward Snowden. Blowing the whistle on the NSA's PRISM wiretapping program is the single biggest event in the defense of our Constitutional rights since the 1963 March on Washington. The good partisan shills at MSNBC and FOX might not see it that way, but I'm confident that history will.

JEERS to Ted Cruz. Everyone thinks he's some fucking genius for leading the government shutdown. What he actually did was make the Republicans look suckier than the Healthcare.gov website.

JEERS to the Supreme Court. Sure, you overturned Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. But you gutted the Voting Rights Act, which means discrimination against minority voters is back in a big way in towns like Pasadena, California. Count on voting discrimination to expand until Congress decides to fix it, which won't happen at least until 2022 given the way districts have been gerrymandered.

Double JEERS to Dianne Feinstein and Michael Bloomberg. Yes, if not for serious pushback by the NRA, we'd have universal background checks right now. And if not for you guys pushing for an assault weapons ban, the NRA, GOA, SAF and other groups wouldn't have been able to rally the faithful sufficiently to shut down federal gun control. Thanks for helping to unite the gun rights crowd and the gun control crowd, and ignite this decade's equivalent of the 1990s abortion wars.

Quadruple JEERS and two raised fingers to the Texas state legislature. You conservatives know how insulting assault weapons and magazine bans are, right? Well, multiply that by ten and you get how enraging abortion restrictions are to everyone who isn't a dyed-in-the-wool anti-abortion activist. I hope Wendy Davis eats your lunch.

CHEERS to Carl Wolfson and others for the XRAY.FM project to bring progressive radio back to Portland. I look forward to the start of broadcasting next month!

Feh to Google. The good: Chromebooks are just killing Microsoft on laptop sales, and it's about goddamn time that someone did. I bought one before going to Arizona on family business and it rules. Also, thanks for doubling your share price since I bought you. The bad: they and Apple were just huge, huge contributors to the PRISM program. The ugly: now they're buying robotics companies. To what end? (And no, we're still not going to use Google+, no matter how hard you try to make us.)

Mild CHEERS to Apple. The new MacBook Pro is a great laptop in every way, and the iPhone I have for work is good. But none of this stuff is revolutionary. It's all evolutionary. I'm hoping that we'll see a revolutionary new product soon - it seems like Google's been eating your lunch here.

JEERS to FaceBook. Yeah, your share price has skyrocketed, and you're still the site I use most. You're limiting how far page updates get broadcast, you're about to roll out autoplay video ads, and you've introduced a number of "shortcuts" that are actually really annoying. And, you still don't have all the same functionality as LiveJournal. The only advantage you have, frankly, is that your user base is almost everybody - except that teens are abandoning you. All this makes me wonder, quite honestly, whether 2013 isn't the year you peaked.

JEERS to Microsoft. Windows 8 is just dreadful.

CHEERS to Twitter, Antiwar.com, and LiveJournal, for Keeping It Simple and Stupid.

CHEERS to Morbid Angel, Deicide, NoMeansNo, Ford Pier, Nine Inch Nails, DOA, and the many other bands I saw live this year; David Bowie, Jello Biafra, Fleshgod Apocalypse, The Polyphonic Spree, The Arcade Fire, Amon Amarth, Megadeth, Iron Reagan, Euphorian, Carcass, Mike Doughty, and others for the albums they released this year; the crew of Hannibal for one of the best-shot television shows everywhere; the cast and crew of Breaking Bad for one of the greatest stories ever told on television; the organizers of the Faux Film Festival, the H. P Lovecraft Film Festival, NOTOCON, NecronomiCon, and the Esoteric Book Conference the best experiences of the year; and the Bizarrocon crowd for getting my creative juices going.

JEERS to these seven phrases.

You won't believe how many JEERS I give Buzzfeed-style headlines.

CHEERS to the dudes who 3D-printed a new ear, and to OHSU for creating new human stem cells via cloning. You might make my promise to live to 120 achievable.

CHEERS to nihilistic_kid on Love is the Law, and for the hug at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival. The former has me re-reading David Schweikhart's book.

JEERS to Phoenix, Arizona. They have real Chicago-style stuffed pizza there. And that's about everything good I can say about Phoenix.

CHEERS to everyone who bought Arcanum Bestiarum, and especially to Boris Balkan for talking it up, and to Watkin's Bookstore, London, for the full-window display. Thanks to you, SC had a career-making year!

CHEERS to my friends old and new, for keeping me focused, and teaching me how to be generous and compassionate without undermining myself or SC.

CHEERS to SC for what she accomplished, and what she helps me accomplish.

CHEERS and many thanks to Portland State University for deigning to allow me to take another shot at a doctorate.

CHEERS to you for reading. See you in 2014!