Four Island

Hey, it's me again! That guy from the other time! Yes indeed, I'm Hatkirby and I'm here to revive yet another old Four Island tradition: the annual predictions post! I first did this in 2008, because a decade-old Linux humor blog I liked to read had done it before. The start of a new year is one of my favorite events, and I love doing little things to ring in this changing of the season. And thus was born: this!

Now, I usually like to post these on New Year's Eve rather than New Year's Day, but I got a little carried away with this one and did not end up finishing it in time. But that's alright! Obviously, the purpose of this isn't to actually predict the future. It's fun to imagine, though! And if any of these predictions do come true, well, my lawyer will be contacting the spacetime continuum for violating my intellectual property. Let's get started!

January 1st
The new year is ushered in with the usual bells and fanfares from every nation that celebrates it! Everyone is so distracted by the endless loop of Auld Lang Syne covers that no one notices one of the fireworks from Times Square get stuck in... a cloud? When the sun finally rises, the world is stunned by the appearance of a rainbow unicorn stepping out of the cloud, shaking its head, and immediately returning to the dimension from which it came. The firework dislodges from the cloud and blows up a domino factory. The consequences of this event are still unfolding.

January 2nd
I receive an email from the "sky ferreira new album" Google Alert that I set up like a decade ago. It is a link to an article that is not about a new Sky Ferreira album. I delete the email.

January 8th
The sequel to the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo Switch: Switched Again Part 2, is announced. The main feature that sets it apart from the original Switch is the introduction of three "workspaces" that allow you to multitask your gameplay. One of them can play games on cartridges, one of them can play digital games, and one of them is only able to show Netflix movies starring Vanessa Hudgens. You may switch between the workspaces whenever you want, but you are not likely to end up at the one you selected, and if you perform poorly in online play, you may find yourself targeted by the royal families of foreign countries.

January 16th
"New year, new me!" I say for the sixteenth day in a row. I check my email and find another "sky ferreira new album" Google Alert. It is a link to an article listing "albums we hope will come out this year". I delete the email.

February 2nd
The Groundhog, of "Groundhog Day" fame, steps out of his hollow in order to host a press conference saying that he shall no longer use his sweet groundhog powers to predict the future for humanity. He says that a four legged friend tipped him off that we're all "kind of douchey" and "pay absolutely no attention to noise complaints". Magicians pretending to be scientists have hypothesized that this "four legged friend" may be the rainbow unicorn from New Year's Day. As the Groundhog leaves the podium, his shadow grows and grows until darkness consumes the room. Attendants stumble out of the building a little disoriented, like if they'd fallen asleep in a movie theater at 2pm.

February 24th
Beloved fanfiction author ToothPasteCanyon releases his first original YA novel, entitled Oi, I Live In London Now, Right?. It is a fantasy story about a boy who was born on the border between the United States and a fictional country known as "England". Subsequently, the boy ends up with an accent that's halfway between the dominant accent of both countries, and it kind of confuses everyone he talks to. The book is a smashing hit, with critics praising both its excellent sense of humor and also the complete lack of anything even resembling a romantic subplot. "I've never seen anything like this before!" said one critic, whose name we legally cannot print. "Marmite and no kissing? I heard God's voice once and it sounded just like this."

February 25th
Local "horny idiot" The Hatted Kirbeh, not to be confused with this blog's author, releases his first original novel, entitled Meat Monitor. It was written by opening the notes app on his phone and scribbling randomly on the SwiftKey keyboard. The result was so gay and perverted that some guy literally died. Anyway pls text me, I'm lonely, lmaoo~~

March 9th
Lady Gaga's seventh album releases! The songs on it are so beautiful, so empowering, so utterly danceable, that many listeners are temporarily stolen from our reality in order to fully bask in the Lady's gift to us, her "sine from above" as it were. "She really did cure my Disease," said one listener, who was honestly serving it to us. I mean we ate. I'm kind of dizzy.

March 20th
A swarm of bees takes over the tech department of one of the state governments; nobody is quite sure which, and since it's apparently a massive hivemind of bees, it's possible it's actually happening to several states at once. The bees have been heard chanting "Anarchy! Anarchy!" while deleting code comments and adding extra semicolons where they aren't needed. One of them came over to my house to infodump at me about aliens. Speaking off the record, this reporter was pretty impressed with the swarm's worldbuilding and hopes that it will carry that creativity forward when it starts rewriting state laws.

April 1st
Archipelago 0.6.1 is released! The list of newly supported games includes "Pokemon Ranger The Second One", "The Looker" (censored), and "The Pit of 100 Trials", a game so confusing and poorly balanced that few dare to play it. A less noticed update concerns the randomizer for "The Witness", which is found to have an option asking whether you'd like to play The Witness or The Witness 2. This is surprising, as Jonathan Blow, the creator of The Witness, has expressed no intention to create a sequel to his game. When approached for comment, randomizer developer NewSoupVi simply chuckled and walked away, causing several women to swoon and almost bonk their heads. Dark Souls 3 randomizer developer nex3 commented, saying "No one said anything when I did the same thing in Dark Souls 3. Like, the same exact thing. Here, I'll do it again," and then she chuckled and did the Homura Akemi hairflip before walking away, causing several women to swoon and almost bonk their heads.

April 19th
The fabled Lingo 2 comes out! Players immediately reach depths of madness heretofore unknown to our solar system. I am among those who go missing. "I'm lost in the maze", a voice calls out from no particular direction. "The red doorway. No, the blue one. Uhh I think you have to, in the control center, I mean, frick that's a spoiler, dang it--" Most players seem overwhelmingly satisfied with this. A couple of people get frustrated with how confusing and labyrinthine the world is.

April 20th
Lingo 2 is updated and it has more mazes now. Creator Brenton Wildes accidentally left some out last time, but, like, when someone complained about there being too many mazes, it reminded him that actually there were supposed to be more. Oh also happy Mother 3 day.

April 29th
Marina's sixth album releases! It's kind of a good thing that I'm still a missing person because otherwise I'd be really annoying about it.

May 17th
After crawling out of the pile of books on my apartment floor for the first time in weeks, I upload the first beta version of the Lingo 2 randomizer. There's definitely way too many options and items. Average runtime of a solo seed on default settings is somewhere in the nine hours range. Someone immediately comments on the thread asking if they'd be okay trying the randomizer without playing the actual game first.

May 18th
I listen to the new Marina album and spend the entire day writing thinkpieces about how every track changed my life. There are graphs involved. Save yourself.

May 25th
Local cat enthusiast "cymrin" updates his cat website for the first time in 20 years. It now contains detailed instructions on how to bring your cat back from the dead if it got sick, say, uh 20 years ago, and you tried contacting the owner of a cat website for advice but he got too scared to answer and instead devoted himself to passionately eating string cheese in a way that was inspirational to the people around him. The police are still looking for this "cymrin"'s whereabouts, but I'm pretty sure no one's gonna snitch.

June 15th
News of a third season of Gravity Falls spreads across the internet. It's immediately debunked because someone looked at the Reddit account that first posted about it and every one of their other posts were on the Ayn Rand subreddit. Meanwhile, in Gravity Falls, that guy holding up the whole planet got slightly uncomfortable, so he redistributed the weight on his shoulders a little bit.

July 5th
After the magician scientist-wannabes spend months trying and failing to find any more information about what happened on New Year's Day, the rainbow unicorn suddenly appears out of the cloud again and says they forgive us for the loud partying because it's actually been a really good music year so far.

July 14th
The Nintendo Switch: Switched Again Part--, uh, that new Nintendo console comes out! Launch titles include a new Super Mario 3D platformer where you can teleport short distances using a talking backpack, and a new WarioWare game that lets you commit treason in real life. There's also a Vanessa Hudgens app where she tries and fails to teach you basic geometry. It immediately outsells both the original Switch and the Wii combined, which the investors love until they realize that according to Nintendo's math, everyone on the planet must've bought three Switch 2's. The SEC surround Vanessa Hudgens's house.

July 17th
A writhing mass of eyeballs, who asked to be referred to as "87", steps out of the rainbow cloud and five hours later becomes the first extra-dimensional entity to ever win a Call of Duty tournament. Sources report that they have kill death ratio of 2.0 and, more importantly, a slurs per minute frequency of zero. 87 could not be reached for comment, but their every step was trailed by pieces of paper with cute drawings of them dressed up as various Team Fortress 2 characters, so, we have a lot of those now.

July 24th
A new Xbox is announced that allows you to unenthusiastically multitask games. A new Playstation is announced that allows you to multitask games as long as you're lying face down in a puddle of water. Nintendo director Miyamoto is heard laughing from his office.

July 24th (five minutes later)
News breaks that the Nintendo Switch sequel has a critical security flaw that causes the Vanessa Hudgens Mii to say your password out loud at max volume whenever you type it in. Nintendo director Miyamoto is no longer heard laughing from his office.

July 31st
Internationally acclaimed short person "Grem" becomes the first Gravity Falls fan to climb a mountain. They are heard shouting the word "echo!!" over and over again, possibly in an attempt to make it sound like there was an echo, because there really wasn't one. They also shouted "I LOVE MY FRIENDS!!!!!!!", which all the reporters thought was very cute.

August 12th
The Hard puzzle in the randomly generated daily Witness puzzle game, Wittle, is significantly larger than usual. When solved, the line spells out precise walking directions from an abandoned Chase bank in Houston, as well as instructions for performing an ominous ritual. A team of disgraced magicians undertakes this trek and finds an empty warehouse with an altar in the middle of it that seems to be emanating strange sounds. Upon performing the ritual, which mainly involved activating a Rube Goldberg machine that cartoonishly blew up the wall behind the altar, the source of the strange noises were found to be an underground gay bar blasting Lady Gaga music. The magicians tweet about their finding and then are never heard from again. "Good for them," several news anchors said in unison. "I'd join them if I wasn't stuck behind this desk."

September 9th
An unidentified yaoi Twitch stream goes viral when one of the fudanshis on it mixes up his words and accidentally says "I keep forgetting that horses ride cops." The sound is used all over TikTok and pretty much no one adds anything to it creatively. The other fudanshi from the Twitch stream records a lolita fashion dance video using the sound though and it's really cool.

September 20th
I remember that I have a website and I write three 5k word blog posts within the span of two days and two of them are just about the Marina album. I'm so excited.

September 21st
For Four Island's 18th anniversary (oh my GOD), I decide to spend a whole day implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol so that I can manage my blog using desktop software, in much the same way as I was excited about using MarsEdit with the MetaWeblog API like a decade ago, and this works about just as much as that did, which is to say, it does not encourage me to write any more blog posts. I do like straight up implementing things though. Gives me a rush. Gives me that burn. Feel my hands, I'm on fire!

September 22nd
I get fifteen emails from people telling me that DigitalOcean IP addresses are still banned in their place of work/learning/recovery, so they can't actually see anything I've done on my website. I can't have anything, can I.

October 1st
Marine biologist and Star Wars conspiracy theorist Booky McBookerton posts a formal notice on her Tumblr that she will not be accepting any more requests to get Marina's sixth album classified as a new species. "I'm a marine biologist, not a Marina biologist," she says, although it's hard to understand her because she's fifty feet underwater and talking into a wet microphone through a snorkel. "Trust me, I'd love to do it. It would be so funny. I'm here to make puns more than anything else. But this is simply outside my area of expertise." She is later spotted writing 50 thousand words of fanfiction in a small journal that is slowly getting eaten alive by, yknow, all the water.

October 13th
Jonathan Blow stuns the world by releasing a new video game for the first time in almost 10 years! It's called Romancing the Manhattan Project and it pretty much goes exactly how you'd expect. It's really pretentious, the gameplay is very divisive, it's got COVID-19 misinformation, there's an explicit sex scene involving anime girls on a homemade nuclear bomb, and it's the best game you've ever played.

October 17th
ToothPasteCanyon's YA novel is adapted into a Switch Switched Again game, London Abridged (It's Falling Down). It's a lot darker than the book version, which is pretty cool. Lots of found family and living through trauma and despair to find the light on the other side. Also there's a British pirate who is the reincarnation of a demon's sister, and that demon tries to get her to have a picnic with the reincarnation of that sister's husband. Needless to say, the demon is in the wrong in this situation.

October 18th
Nintendo forcibly releases a follow-up to ToothPasteCanyon's game called Ultra London Abridged, that's not a sequel but like, is kind of the same game with some story elements changed and some minor gameplay improvements? It's widely panned for dulling down some of the story's more serious moments, and ruining the game's climax by making a fairy turn the boy fully American, after which he says "I love paying for private health insurance. It really is so much more reliable than the socialist nonsense they have overseas."

October 29th
Finally, on the twelve year anniversary of her first album's release, Sky Ferreira finally drops her second album, "Masochism". Sort of. It's quickly apparent that her old record label, the one that dropped her by automated process once they determined that they'd tortured her enough, actually just took several of the track masters she'd already recorded, slapped some AI-generated backing vocals on them, and then released it under the guise of "setting her free". Naturally, this is completely unacceptable, and complete cities are burned to the ground because honestly us fans have suffered enough and they're just laughing in our face now. Meanwhile, Sky Ferreira herself doesn't learn of this until the next day, because she was pretty busy being two hours late for one of her own concerts, and then had to spend the night in a holding cell because she used a homemade catapult to throw one of the venue's subwoofers into a fountain. Witnesses say that it was one of the best concert experiences they'd ever had in their lives.

October 30th
I receive an email from the "sky ferreira new album" Google Alert. I set it on fire.

November 1st
Archipelago 0.6.2 is released, including the Lingo 2 randomizer! No enhancements were made since the beta from months ago, mostly because everyone who played it became eternally trapped in the mazes and could not provide any feedback. So that's pretty much a smashing success! Meanwhile, the TUNIC randomizer receives an update that makes the fox gay. "No, gayer than before," say developers Scipio and Silent, alternating syllables between them. "You thought it was enough for every pot and every patch of grass to be a check, did you? Well what if you could kiss every gay person in the world and that was a check? And also what if the fox can't drive? You're welcome."

November 2nd
Someone manages to escape the Lingo 2 randomizer and reports a logic error. And now we're stuck with it for like five months or something ughh.

November 8th
Astoundingly, despite it not being an election year, the rainbow unicorn from the clouds is elected the 48th President of the United States. They descend from their cotton candy throne and perch upon a broken water fountain in Detroit. "Dear citizens," they begin, in a velvety tone that not a few people found rather comforting, and in fact we have reports that at least one of them reconnected with an estranged family member who had accidentally stabbed them years ago, because this moment in time, this elegant speech was so clear and evocative that it reminded them of how little time one really has with their loved ones; "Dear citizens," the unicorn repeated, since this sentence was starting to get away from them, "We've had our ups and downs. You partied really hard one day, I got annoyed and called the police, some things were said to my friend the Groundhog, but that's all water under the bridge. I promise to uphold the virtues of the bravest among you, by which I naturally mean Lady Gaga and Marina. I promise to put forth one hoof, and then another, and then a third one, and after that, well, I'm sure you can guess. And I promise to do this over and over again until I reach the end of the road, at which point I'll have to decide whether to turn left, or right. And my dear citizens, I am sure that together, we can find a solution to this problem. Thank you."

November 12th
For the first time in recent memory, nothing really happens all day. Everyone was kind of just chilling tbh. God we need this.

November 13th
Terrifying Ohioan Gasmasque publishes a Worm fanfic that is the length of Worm squared. The entire planet is suffocated under the weight of billions of pieces of paper. AO3 commenters say the fic is "witty, queer, and remarkably modern, considering the multiple lifetimes it likely took to finish such a work". Bystanders smoking weed say "Help, I can't breathe".

December 4th
A black hole opens up near the [TODO: google search list of Maryland landmarks]. Amazingly, it does not cause any damage to the surrounding ecosystem or people. It does suck in every last cent of cold hard American cash in the vicinity, including taking the credit card details out of Apple Wallets from passersby. When someone got drunk enough to ask it what it was doing, it simply said "overtime", and then put on a little butler hat and disappeared. President Elect Unicorn tweeted that this was "poggers".

December 25th
The first generation 10 Pokemon games, Pokemon Holly and Pokemon Jolly, are released! They take place in a new region called Noelva, which is drenched in an eternal Christmas season. Every building, every field, every person is constantly decked out in Christmas attire. A new type called Joy is introduced, which is strong against Dark and Normal, and weak to Steel and Poison. The three starter Pokemon are all different forms of Delibird. The game's plot has to do with a secret mission to take down the region's government from the inside by using a special new legendary Pokemon that is able to impersonate people and switch places with them. Players can expect to spend hours rolling around in the snow with their Pokemon, with several minutes of action-packed storytelling in between where the player is constantly told that they should step aside and let the adults take care of things. Critics call it no doubt the most gravely disturbing pair of Pokemon games released thus far, and psychologists are going so far as to recommend anxiety counseling to children who play the games. Nintendo's stock value subsequently skyrockets even higher.

December 31st
The author of the blog Four Island, me, writes a post containing humorous predictions for the upcoming year. Everyone likes it! None of them come true. Except for the ones that do!

That's that! It definitely got longer than I expected, but that's sort of the default now I guess. I can't wait to see how these all totally definitely 100% happen in real time! We should all be seeing that rainbow unicorn in the clouds any minute now. And now, since I haven't said it yet:

Happy New Year!