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FYI! Last read at 20:18 on 2025/04/11.

This is the year that was

As the hope that was the Arab Spring turns into the chaos that is the Islamic State, and it's hard to be a schoolgirl if Boko Haram or the Taliban are your neighbours, this year has certainly seen its share of tragedy. A Turkish mine, a Korean ferry, Benjamin Netanyahu deciding there weren't enough dead Palestinians (and Hamas deciding that Netanyahu wasn't dead yet) on and on that will go... One plane shot down, one plane crashed, and one plane forever missing, not to mention the lurking zombie horror known as Ebola.
This has been a heck of a year for generating corpses in all manner of unpleasant ways.

But, that said, this year offers its own good moments. The centenary of The First World War (that being an incredible corpse-causing event). Landing an itty-bitty space probe on an itty-bitty lump of rock a bajillion miles away. A referendum in Scotland. Facebook paying stupid money for WhatsApp. A dozen celebrity mishaps and the greatest selfie of all time.

Mom and I both agree that one of the highlights of 2014 was Malala being jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here she is, receiving the Liberty Medal, another award offered for what she has achieved. I am reminded of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - "some have greatness thrust upon them".

This image was sourced from The Daily Mail, and given their usual approach to other people's copyright ("© Twitter" or my favourite "© The Internet" !), I was tempted to place a caption at the bottom saying "© A Newspaper".

On a more personal sense, I discovered that cheese can be enjoyable, I bought a Livebox that streams animé nicely, I mocked the YearOfCode and took a maths GCSE, attached an OLED to a Pi, celebrated 12 years in France, translated some Japanese, fixed bits of RISC OS, ran Windows on RISC OS on a Pi purely for the lulz, finally got myself and oscilloscope and a reason to use it, fixed some junk PMR radios and took apart an eCig, shared an advent calendar and created a photo-story. Along the way, I watched a lot of animé. ☺
There were no major events, just lots of little memories.

 

And there you have it. A b.log post of some form every single day in December. All that remains to be said is HAPPY NEW YEAR!

There's just time for a group wave before the Playmo guys tuck into a giant maccha manjyu wagashi:

 

 

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