the Ken-Year Chronicle

Stepped into September, shit went Critical

the Flooding Man Event: Burning Man is an annual dionysian event held by those with enough time to just fuck around in thre Black Rock Desert of Nevada. It is held at the end of August so that by Labor Day, they can burn an effigy of ‘the Man’ which seemingly kills one rich person each year. A documentary of the event can be found in Malcolm in the Middle Season 7, episode 1. Weed, esoteric art pieces, naturalistic nudity, communal sex, and weirdos in the hot desert sun. Oh one special thing about the event is that the participants have to make up the event themselves. They have to bring their own weed, do their own concert, and everything else; in that way it is different to Coachella or EDC. It is debated on how ‘revolutionary’ burners are considering this event started with other people protesting against their use of a private jet (for mile high shenanigans) and other environmental endangerment they bring to Black Rock. 70,000 people came this year. They partied and partied until the 1st of September. Then, a casual Flordian rain storm ran through Nevada releasing flash floods not seen in a century. The inch of rain met the dry sand and turned the event into a tomb of deep deep mud. The region would be closed to stop anyone from leaving or coming as it was far too muddy. Those who used their vehicles would find danger in escaping anyways as mud covered the roads. The nearby airport was closed as well. Burners woke up unable to burn and then they really had to escape. While the organizers tried to give out a guide book on surviving (on the website) illness spread through the mud and one person supposedly died. Now there was a few celebrities at this event including Comedian Chris Rock and DJ Diplo. Diplo NEEDED to go as he had a show in the District of Columbia soon and he would be apart of a great exodus leaving the camp. Trudging through mud for 6 miles, Chris Rock and Diplo finally found  a road where a fan rescued them. Eventually, the man was burned and the burners escaped. Not that it can’t rain in Nevada but one wonders if Global Warming had anything to do with this.

All That Glitters is Gold: Steve Harwell was previously a rapper but also a founding member of the rock band Smash Mouth along with Greg Camp, Kevin Coleman, and Paul De Lisle. The would hit it off with “Walking on the Sun” which earned them a place in the first Shrek film. They sang the opening song in the movie “All Star” which would become a generational hit. You see, the movie would already land as a childhood constant for millennials and gen z (even Alpha) so the song could be recognized by anyone who went to public school. Then in 2016 specifically, the song’s music video popped off in the Youtube meme scene at the same time of a Shrek nostalgia run with “Shrek is love Shrek is life”. The music video would be edited and spoofed very many times easily becoming an earworm for those with internet. One of those earrooms repeated lyrics of the song every so often a certain thing happened by the worst video was “All Star but they don’t stop coming”. So by then, Harwell and the others already earned a place in the hearts of young people who have never even been to their shows. One concert they held was during the height of the Covid Saga where they said fuck all to the virus. Authorities later cited the night as being a superspreader event. And then on September 4th, the day the effigy was burned, Steve Harwell died of liver failure. Nah, the ritual didn’t go to him, I’m just saying. He has had a fight with health issues for 2 years. With the announcement, many tweeters mourned for him as they remembered a faint childhood memory. 

Mediterranean Mayhem: A hurricane usually spawns in the tropical zone as the planet’s shape holds low pressure zones there along with super hot water warmed up by the sun leading to much larger storms at more temperate areas. Because of this, in the Old World, you only really received such cyclones from the Indian Ocean although sometimes the Pacific. Europeans would take the term hurricane from Taino natives in the Caribbean islands as they faced them every year. A storm like that spawning in the Mediterranean is quite literally unheard of. Regardless, a unique omega block (two low pressure zones trapping a high pressure zone) in the Ionian Sea allowed for Storm Daniel to spawn. Daniel would first take to the Balkans, ravaging the Thessaly region with flooding they never saw before. Daniel then took a Jasonic detour hitting Libya and even into the Palestinian corner of the Mediterranean before dying. Being one of the deadliest storms, it damaged about 20,000 people and costed at least 20 billion euro in Greece. Again, those in the desert areas would be trapped with mud while the hillsides of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey added plenty of momentum for more flooding. In the aftermath, there seemed to be a decent amount of cooperation with neighboring countries to help out these victims. It’s a shame this didn’t happen during the Ottoman Empire but maybe it shouldn’t have happened at all without fossil fuels burning the planet. Side note, the storm also spawned on September 4th. 

the Masterson Ordeal: we had to cover one of these basically each month. Daniel Peter Masterson is a New York born actor who is most notable for his role as Steven Hyde in That 70’s Show. He is also the older brother of Christopher Masterson who played Francis in Malcolm in the Middle. Funnily, they both played brattier characters. Anyways, more recently, DPM has found himself in deep legal trouble. Pre-covid, at least 5 women came out with sexual assault allegations against DPM. Now 4 of those girls and DPM himself are members of the Church of Scientology, famous for getting exposed in a South Park episode. Apparently it is against Scientological philosophy to out each other to the authorities so those girls got excommunicated and subsequently harassed. Some of them reported being stalked or sometimes spied on while others seemed to receive indirect attacks. During Covid, there would be various criminal and civil cases although it would seem his party was able to postpone things and extend proceedings. That was until August where things to be finalized on three counts of rape. It would be around September where I first noticed anyone mention this situation on Twitter and on the Official Podcast. The conversations on twitter weren’t extensive but they also mostly dealt with the reactions of co-stars Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. The two tried a buzzer beater hail mary throw of a character letter to the judge after the sentencing. Their letters were actually two of many other letters sent to the judge pleading about how cool DPM was but it didn’t change a thing. Their two letters did go public causing said public to attack them online. The two made a video on Instagram to address this and kind of apologize to the public but chat responded with “you only made this because you got caught” and “you’re actors and you still read your script in the most robotic fashion”. Masterson would be given 30 years in prison (he is currently 47) although it could be shortened by five years if he really is the coolest guy. 

CashApp Glitch: the validity of this event is in flux. On the tiktok app, with many naive teens and otherwise trusting adults, there seemed to be a rumored glitch with the CashApp. CashApp is an internet bank where people can hold and transfer money when they don’t have cash on them. There’s nothing crazy to it and I am unsure why a rumored glitch was even spreading. Maybe there was an update, maybe there was a hacking. The glitch would allow users to give their own account any amount of money, according to the tutorials, and then perhaps one would withdraw that money and place it in their real bank account. Not 24 hours later, warnings and bounties came out of CashApp finding folks in fraud. People found that their CashApp account was in the negative of how ever many billion they stole and they needed to either end their life or find that money from someone else. There would be a lot more videos of people freaking out they owe CashApp than the original videos of learning how to profit from the glitch. But then I don’t believe that many people owed CashApp any money, especially in the trillions. The government would be after them for depositing that much money in their bank accounts (before they could print it out). Very silly and stupid weekend. 

Mexican Alien Corpse: the relevance of this event is faint. Recently, alien life had been resurfacing in the American thought bubble with that whole Chinese balloon thing and then there were releases of ufo images over the summer. Did not mention it because while the media pushed the story, nobody was looking into it. In my notes I literally had the episode called “Nobody wanted to talk about the UFOs” because even if they were real, we still have to clock in, make rent, and deal with our daily problems. South of the United States is the Land of Modelo, where journalist Jamie Maussen revealed something brand new to the Mexican Congress. He has been a bit of a mass producer of alien corpses over the last few years with each of them pointing to fraud. This time, spoilers, seems no different. This time, from 2017, he returns to Mexico City with two alien corpses which he retrieved from the Incan city of Cuzco. He claimed that 30% of its dna was not terrestrial and that the specimens were 1000 years old. Well the university that carbon-dated his pieces and other scientists completely disagree. One suggested it was an animal corpse (specifically alpaca) mixed with human stuff which allowed everyone else to simply ignore the story. Nobody wanted to talked about the Mexican Alien Corpse.   

Unity vs Developers: Hey remember this year’s reddit episode? Let’s just do that one more time. Unity is a video game company that runs their own engine. I don’t know a lot about it but a game engine is basically a software program/platform that allows one to input all their codes and functions for maybe a special project or just a video game. Video games are very much layered systems of media, much like movies. There’s the actual developers who use engines to make the games that are sold on consoles from Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft. Unity is an engine with many big games such as Cuphead, Among Us, and Hearthstone along with smaller titles like Pokemon Go. It do be making a lot of money but it was not really enough to cover the cost of running all these games. So they decided they would begin charging developers a little bit more for each download of a game after a certain threshold. So, you know, let’s say the threshold was 200. After 200 downloads, Fanum tax! Also the game needs to have met a revenue threshold but the tax isn’t based on how many people are necessarily buying a game. You can buy a game once but download it on 4 different consoles before you even think about your assortment of computers. That would be 4 cases of taxation. So the similarity to the Reddit plan taxation based on usage even if its ever so slight. What’s the real price? Well the real download threshold was 200,000 and so after that uhhhh…

This. Thank you Verge or whoever specifically made this graph. Now 20 cents per Cuphead download may not be crazy but Cuphead isn’t Nintendo. They have to consider paying their own staff and other costs first before this sudden Unity tax. So many developers decided to just opt out of using Unity altogether or patriotically riot against Unity since they had until January 1st for this to be implemented. Now this situation actually wouldn’t affect consumers, the gamers, at all (just like how the Reddit thing wouldn’t impact any user) but they weren’t necessarily happy with it either. Forget them, the majority of the protest came from developers. The main question to this tax is how the hell would downloads be tracked. It’s not like everyone even legally downloads games or the current trackers that exist being totally accurate. So to compromise, Unity decided that developers could self report their downloads. Now we’re on IRS tier of taxation. More people dropped off although not everyone truly could. One cannot really just transfer a game’s files from one engine to the next. That’s like putting a car engine on a bus. So they kept fighting back. Well, in the end it worked for Reddit. Other privileges offered in the new compromise is that there wouldn’t be retroactive taxing meaning the taxing of games will only start for those developed after Jan 1st. They also decided they would have highly sophisticated tracking to make sure there’s no miscounting due to consumer trolling and other types of adjustments. In the end, we will see if the changes pass on the 1st.

5 Boroughs Deep: FUCK! How many times are we visiting NYC this year? How fucked can a city be??? We haven’t even been to Texas but this is like the 5th Manhattan story. Here we go. Now the Dutch did originally colonize Manhattan but they didn’t last long enough to do that cool terraforming thing they did with areas like Holland. So every year, the city is already sinking especially since it has 1 quintillion skyscrapers. That’s fine though. It’s not like The Batman. Yet. Oh-Oh-phelia, was a tropical storm born east of Florida. It did not align enough chakras to become a full hurricane but it still hit the Carolinas hard. Then the storm cell dissipated over New Jersey although they had flood warnings. A low pressure system encouraged Ophelia to remind us of the flood the Lumineers sang about. It crashed into the City with 4 inches of rain to pour for about 2 days. Water fell hard and filled up quick. Videos would surface on twitter of massive flooding, although the Manhattans just swam through to make it to work. The subway would have to be stopped, planes canceled, and even school buses couldn’t even rescue those poor kids in school. Even the Mets got canceled (they still won under the circumstances)! NY and NJ authorities put out State of Emergencies during the storm although it mainly affected the 5 Boroughs of the City. This Global Warming DLC is going crazy….

Release me Pete Davidson

Also, September is for sure a 6/10, too much water.