2016 has been a wild ride, and with only 3 weeks left until we welcome in the new year it's time to continue a long standing tradition of idiotic predictions. Focus: What are your predictions for 2017? Pretty much anything goes, except the soon to be dead. I'm sure that thread will be around shortly. With this being an election year, I'm sure some people have related predictions, but since we already have a serious and politics thread both ongoing let's not respond to any such predictions in this thread. I'm sure that's fairly obvious to most posters, but just a reminder since the 'murican media is still talking about it nonstop. Admin edit: no politics. Keep that shit to the serious thread(s). Alt Focus: What were the craziest, most interesting, most unpredictable, or most relevant to you moments of 2016? Public or personal.
War. I predict Putin will pull some severe shit, counting on his new BFF to stand back and keep Making 'Murica Great (tm). NATO v. The New Warsaw, with the US as guest referee and potential tag partner when it gets *really* ugly. Joke answer: we finally get real hoverboards, which are almost immediately run over by flying cars.
Most Unpredictable: fuck what anyone says, there is only one right answer, and its obvious. Aside from the election, ending up in Minni was a shock.
Alt-Focus: Putting aside anything election-related and anything sad, the most surprising thing that happened to me this year was going to Australia for free with two weeks' notice. The circumstances of the trip were nuts as is, but Australia was always one of those "I'd like to go there once teleportation is invented" destinations and not a "I'm going to actively try and go there one day" destination. I'd never imagined myself going there so it was just another level of surrealism on top of an already surreal experience. Also, between the news and my aforementioned story about accidentally banging one, I sure couldn't have predicted 2016 would have so many Nazis in it. On the notable if not unpredictable side of things, this was the year when I was first asked to write something from an editor tracking me down and pitching me, rather than the other way around, which felt really awesome despite it being a short unpaid contribution to a collection of writers discussing a theme on a website that I don't like, but STILL. It's not like I was going to say no. Related, if it's not too declassé to mention, I also got cut the biggest check for a single article yet this year, and it was for a totally random piece that started as a throwaway joke on Facebook that an editor acquaintance saw and asked me to extend into an essay. So that was surprising. I also never thought I would date a couple, albeit briefly, but that was another thing that happened. I did a 5k, which is a sentence I never thought I would ever say. I was named future treasurer of a Super PAC, which is not a look I ever imagined for myself. My theme of this year has been "fuck it, why not," so I've had a bunch of adventures, both very big and very small. Focus: Since I get thrown some completely outrageous curveball roughly every other month or so for my entire life, I gave up on playing predictions a long time ago, and it seems even more meaningless going into 2017. Literally anything could happen on a personal, national, or global scale and there would be a part of me that thinks, "You know what, I can't even muster up the energy to be surprised anymore."
Alt-Focus: 2016 was a spectacular year for me. I love to travel, but really hadn't ever considered that I might be able to just peace out for a year, travel the world, and everything would be okay. I'm in my 30s, do people really pause their careers to do this? Even before I left on the trip, I wondered if we'd make it the whole time, or get tired of lugging our shit around, or get homesick, or find out our budgeting was way off. I worried about communicating, and finding our way, and getting sick in countries with shitty health services. None of that happened. 11+ months and 32 countries later, we're a few days from coming home. We were happy, avoided major disasters, and our budget was great. We communicated when we needed to, found our way where we had to go, and stayed healthy. I'm pretty frickin' proud of us. My prediction for 2017 is that it can't possibly live up to 2016. I just hope that fewer people die. My life is almost out of really old people. And I hope I find a job.
Sports: Super bowl - Patriots. I hate it, but they probably are the best team... again. Soccer - Investigation of FIFA takes a new turn, with less US involvement this time. Politics: - The wall is built by our new president who decides to Trump/America the fuck out of it, and we have a glitzy show piece that extends 20 miles in either direction around some Texas border entrance. The subsequent 'wall' along the rest of the border remains a chain link fence. - Putting the over/under on liberal calls for impeachment throughout the year at 76. - Trump is unable to get himself off twitter. Certain tweets result in wide scale protests, a new low in the devolution of politics for both sides. - The EU doesn't totally fall apart in 2017, but has further disasters and continues to crumble. - The left begins to realize the fracturing within its ranks. It's happening in Europe as well(hence the EU's disasters). This might end up being a good or a bad thing, no idea. A lot of this will revolve around defense/attack of Hillary, but the problems run much deeper. Other/pop culture: - The super hero craze starts to die down. Some of the movies are fun, but people are getting sick of it. - A new social platform that is essentially a copy of twitter emerges. The way that company is being managed is a mess, and they are pissing off huge swaths of users. Twitter will blame this on Trump, but in reality it will have little to do with him. - New media conglomerates begin to emerge. This is already happening, but it's a loose associate of blogs, youtube, and other outlets. Some of these start to merge and begin challenging the establishment media. With Jon Stewart gone, and the new Daily Show plus John Oliver turning into a mess, and the millennial hatred of the media in general this is inevitable. Breitbart will stick around, but it's not like that shit show is going to fill the gap. - The SJWs whine incessantly about the new liberal outlets emerging. They already are, they'll just whine harder as they get more popular. - Major films continue to mostly suck. - Television gets even better. - Interest in space exploration rises significantly.
The Wall isn't getting built, ever. 17 comic book movies will come out. Before the end of the year, four will have spinoff released and all others will be rebooted to even MORE terrible extremes. Every other talented musician will die. That means Drake and Beyoncé will still be alive. Beyoncé will release another shitty ego-stroke concept album that nobody will play and will sweep the Grammys. Having the world's biggest police apologist as POTUS will make simmering tensions towards police FAR worse in America. That's not a prediction, but guaranteed. SJW and third wave feminist tards will become more whiney and obnoxious than ever, refusing to accept any accountability or facts.
Okay, I'm calling it: no politics outside of the two threads that we already have going, so we can quarantine the word vomit and angry opinions to a section of the board that people can choose to visit or avoid. I don't want it bleeding over into the rest of the board.
2017 will claim: Lewis Black Hugh Hefner And at least 2 hof NFL players. Guardians of.the Galaxy 2 will not suck, neither will Wonder Woman, but most other comic movies will, and they will move to tv. American Gods and Preacher will fill the void in my TV soul that Game of Thrones causes. I will care less about sports, because fuck the Patriots and Alabama and Ohio State I will buy another Ducati, hit 1200 pounds in the big three, move, finish my MBA, and go to Portugal.