Well, the year of 2024 is almost over. And in some ways, I am glad. Me and my brother seemed to have more bad luck than usual this year! But now it's time for my annual recap...

JANUARY
I go to Anthro New England 2024 and have fun, not just as Zak Wolf and Sam Valentino, but also as my new scaly 'sona Dawson Dragon to celebrate my Zodiac animal's year!

FEBRUARY
A good chunk of my "Arthur" YTPs get blocked by PBS Distribution during one of their tirades, including the very first one I made over 16 years ago, and so I have to offload them onto my Google Drive folder for ex-YouTube Poops.
I have to say goodbye to my old BMW 528i after its steering mechanism starts failing, and I buy a nice little Toyota Camry LE as my next set of wheels. I still have more than a year of loan payments left to make on it, but at least fueling it up costs much less than it did with the Beamer! AND it's got 4-wheel drive!

MARCH
I start to get in some promotional work as K-O of the Brockton Rox.
Near the end of the month, I go to Anime Boston 2024 as Sam Valentino, Private Toon Detective.

APRIL
I get to see that solar eclipse visible in our area.

MAY
The New England Knockouts season begins, but due to behind-the-scenes problems, we do not debut the team's bulldog mascot Marv that I am set to train and escort once we do introduce him.
The Brockton Rox season begins, kind of on the back burner this year compared to the Knockouts, but it gives me as K-O the Kangaroo all the time I want to meet and greet my adoring fans!

JUNE
I go to Fan Expo Boston 2024, being temporarily held at the Hynes Convention Center due to the BCEC undergoing renovations. A little helter-skelter, but still fun!
MeTV Toons starts up, and since we don't use an antenna in my house, I sign up to FrndlyTV and have fun watching classic animation from the 30s to the 90s!

JULY
The Rox plays a game on the Fourth of July, and so I get to gussy up K-O in an Uncle Sam hat and with American flags, despite him being an Australian kangaroo!
I celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Jim Carrey classic "The Mask!"

AUGUST
The Rox season ends on a bitter loss. But my good furry friend Cyan comes to the next-to-last game!
I begin a side gig with my college's TV studio, digitizing their old analog master tape library for future preservation!

SEPTEMBER
I commission a new fursuit head of Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius, in time for the character's 75th birthday!
Because of financial problems that electronics recycling/reselling company faces, I get laid off from my tech job. (They even ended up closing the facilities I worked at shortly afterward, consolidating all their operations to a single location.) Since then, I've been applying left and right for computer-related jobs and have had a few interviews, but no luck so far.

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER
I celebrate 20 years of officially being a furry!
I have a great Hallow-weekend at Furpocalypse 2024, now at the Hilton Stamford Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in Stamford, CT! I even host a panel there about making YTPs!

DECEMBER
I end up going back on Social Security income to help pay my bills!
We have a great Christmas, our best one in years!

And that brings us up to now. As you might have seen, I've been having more bad luck than usual this year. In addition to the BMW, and getting laid off from that computer tech job, there is also my not getting hired for any of the jobs I've applied to and/or been interviewed at so far. The day right before Halloween, I got into a really minor car accident, but still had to pay a little money for it. And the therapist I had been seeing for 21 years, he had to move to another company that doesn't accept the health insurance plan I use, so I haven't been able to talk with him for a while, but I am currently arranging to start meeting with a new therapist for kicking off the next year. Near the end of November, at my college the U-Matic tape deck I had been using in digitizing those master tapes broke down and we've yet to get it fixed, so I haven't been able to work with them for a while (in addition to getting it repaired, we're also going to need to get ready to "bake" those U-Matic tapes suffering from Sticky Shed Syndrome so we can save the footage from them, and get a working DVCPro deck again). I've also been ending up coming across more fire alarms going off than usual! A pretty humiliating one was a couple weeks before I got laid off, at my former job. All these alarms have been really hard on my anxiety and ears, and soon I began to get pretty jumpy about them after a while! I even made a couple of videos to show what the sensory overload is like in the ways I usually do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19sYK9tHspk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcNtGLGtS5g
At least aside from my former job, these fire alarms are largely not like the older and LOUDER ones my public schools had that really terrified me and made me the butt of other students' jokes. (The high school will soon be undergoing an expansion and renovation, so they're going to need to get a new alarm system as part of it anyways!)

It's not just me having all this bad luck this year; my brother has as well. In February his Google phone got broken while he was at work and had to spend money on a new one (he decided to go to the Apple side like me and get an iPhone, and I was really glad to help him!) The day I had to say goodbye to my old Beamer, my brother injured his knee during a workout and needed crutches for a while. Last month, my brother's car engine had to be replaced (I've told him many times he should often check the oil!), and that was really expensive for him. And he underwent at least a couple other mishaps as well that I was able to sympathize with him.

Also regarding YouTube videos, this is my most-viewed video I've uploaded this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC5xvMhlhhY
A demonstration of the old "The Simpsons Cartoon Studio" PC game from 1996, showing off some animated segments I made starring Our Favorite Family, including a few recreations of ones I made playing this game as a kid in the late 1990s. Even the thumbnail here, that was the very first animation I made on it when I was nine years old, with Marge slipping on a banana peel planted by Bart when going to answer the door. A simple start, but hey, the jokes in the Golden age of the Simpsons TV show were often simple but really funny! For this, I ran the game on my 2005 PowerBook G4, running the game via Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's "Classic" mode.

So, what will 2025 bring? I really hope I get another computer tech job, maybe one that pays better than my old one did. Then after I had been working that for a while, me and my brother can get started in looking for an apartment so we don't have to live with our parents, because they're not going to be around forever. And 2025 will also likely be when the New England Knockouts' bulldog mascot will be ready to make his debut (I won't be performing him, but I'll still get to train him and be his escort at several games and events, being the stadium's veteran mascot performer and still working for them as K-O!) I'm also really looking forward to Anthro New England in less than three weeks, with its' mystery theme that would be right up Sam Valentino's alley! Change can be a little scary at times, but with all the changes I've faced, I've gotten used to several of them. So I guess I may as well go with my family tradition of just "wait and see!"