Every so often, you’ll see people talk about what they’ve done this year whenever New Year’s Eve starts approaching. The Game Awards are… certainly something that exists, that’s the most positive thing I feel comfortable saying about them, TV and news stations have sometimes had trips down memory lane, and depending on which sport it is you’ll even see stuff like this for the end of a sports season and especially at the end of an entire decade.
2025 has been a year of major transition for me, being my first full year after finishing my undergraduate education, but honestly, outside of my work life and being an irresponsible brat crashing out elsewhere on this site about Pokémon Legends Z-A (seriously, what was I even thinking?), I can’t really say this year was all that eventful for me and I don’t think Christmas and New Year’s is going to change much. So instead, since I’m feeling particularly nostalgic tonight, I wanted to make a thread about a different year I seemingly plucked out of thin air, because… wow, 2019 was absolutely crazy.
Welcome to this week’s episode of bet2002’s Annoying Yap Sessions. This week we’re inviting you hear just what all happened in what I’ve deemed one of the most quietly influential years of my life up to this point. Where do I even begin!? Well, how about this? It all started in the winter of 2018-19, and at the time I had been in the middle of a since-scrapped series of Pokémon playthroughs, as I was hoping to replay all of the other games I had in my collection at the time since I had no desire to play Let’s Go and I wasn’t particularly fond of how Sword & Shield was looking either. Before I scrapped the series on account of pausing my Pokémon White playthrough for a Shiny Foongus soft-reset hunt that, I kid you not, took so long over at least a full year that I’m convinced those fake Poké Balls are Shiny locked, what had motivated me to hunt that was finding not one, but two full odds Shinies in my favorite core series game at the time, SoulSilver, both Poison-Types and both before I even had five Badges. (For context, this happened after I unlocked Surf and started exploring all the extra areas for the PokéDex and encounters.) I had not realized it until then, but Poison-Types were, historically speaking, by far the most common Type for Shiny Pokémon I would find over the course of the series and it wasn’t even close. Finding two of these in the same save file of my favorite game had me ecstatic, but that was nothing compared to what was to come.
Throughout the back half of 2019 going into 2020, several things would happen. The onset of the pandemic was actually something I had previously written about in my high school journalism class I took as a senior, completely oblivious to what would happen just months later. Speaking of, 2019-20 was my senior year of high school, and, uh… being a “pandemic senior” was certainly an interesting experience to say the least. (It gave me an out to skip going to Prom, at least, so that was fun.) My journalism class also inspired me to start exploring writing of my own in 2019 and I started devising plans for what I had hoped would become the first series I ever wrote on my own that wasn’t something I made for school before the 2021-22 academic year completely shot my motivation in the chest to continue. August 7th, 2019 is a day that lives in history in my heart as the day, completely coincidental, I ended up making a call-out prediction that actually ended up coming true that was so rare, I ran the math afterwards and calculated this made the Shiny moments earlier in the year look quaint next to literal lottery jackpot odds. And finally, towards the end of the year and going into 2020 (and subsequently, the pandemic), I realized, for the first and so far still the only time in my life I might actually have a crush on someone. Emphasis on might. I never really figured out how I felt about the situation completely. All I knew was that me developing honest feelings for someone like that was and is something that simply does not happen, and when it does, it does not happen often, especially nowadays. It wasn’t all good news, though, as 2019 had other harder moments as well, the biggest one by far being some close family friends of ours losing their teenage son in a tragic accident over the summer of that year. While we were on vacation, I might add. I have never seen our family agree on something so quickly as when we all unanimously decided, yeah, we need to come home.
I know it sounds strange to want to make an entire thread for something like this, and it absolutely is, but the idea behind this thread isn’t just so I can deliver you guys some Yappuccinos. The title of this thread, and my post, may be all about the craziest year of my life up to this point, but what I actually want to do is create and provide a space where you all can share some of your own stories, too. Doesn’t have to specifically be a certain year, either. I just love hearing what people have to share and say about what they’ve seen in life. If anything else, I can at least rest easy knowing I’ve finally gotten around to writing this thread. Oh, would you look at that, 2019 was the year I joined both Smogon and Discord as well, how neat.
2025 has been a year of major transition for me, being my first full year after finishing my undergraduate education, but honestly, outside of my work life and being an irresponsible brat crashing out elsewhere on this site about Pokémon Legends Z-A (seriously, what was I even thinking?), I can’t really say this year was all that eventful for me and I don’t think Christmas and New Year’s is going to change much. So instead, since I’m feeling particularly nostalgic tonight, I wanted to make a thread about a different year I seemingly plucked out of thin air, because… wow, 2019 was absolutely crazy.
Welcome to this week’s episode of bet2002’s Annoying Yap Sessions. This week we’re inviting you hear just what all happened in what I’ve deemed one of the most quietly influential years of my life up to this point. Where do I even begin!? Well, how about this? It all started in the winter of 2018-19, and at the time I had been in the middle of a since-scrapped series of Pokémon playthroughs, as I was hoping to replay all of the other games I had in my collection at the time since I had no desire to play Let’s Go and I wasn’t particularly fond of how Sword & Shield was looking either. Before I scrapped the series on account of pausing my Pokémon White playthrough for a Shiny Foongus soft-reset hunt that, I kid you not, took so long over at least a full year that I’m convinced those fake Poké Balls are Shiny locked, what had motivated me to hunt that was finding not one, but two full odds Shinies in my favorite core series game at the time, SoulSilver, both Poison-Types and both before I even had five Badges. (For context, this happened after I unlocked Surf and started exploring all the extra areas for the PokéDex and encounters.) I had not realized it until then, but Poison-Types were, historically speaking, by far the most common Type for Shiny Pokémon I would find over the course of the series and it wasn’t even close. Finding two of these in the same save file of my favorite game had me ecstatic, but that was nothing compared to what was to come.
Throughout the back half of 2019 going into 2020, several things would happen. The onset of the pandemic was actually something I had previously written about in my high school journalism class I took as a senior, completely oblivious to what would happen just months later. Speaking of, 2019-20 was my senior year of high school, and, uh… being a “pandemic senior” was certainly an interesting experience to say the least. (It gave me an out to skip going to Prom, at least, so that was fun.) My journalism class also inspired me to start exploring writing of my own in 2019 and I started devising plans for what I had hoped would become the first series I ever wrote on my own that wasn’t something I made for school before the 2021-22 academic year completely shot my motivation in the chest to continue. August 7th, 2019 is a day that lives in history in my heart as the day, completely coincidental, I ended up making a call-out prediction that actually ended up coming true that was so rare, I ran the math afterwards and calculated this made the Shiny moments earlier in the year look quaint next to literal lottery jackpot odds. And finally, towards the end of the year and going into 2020 (and subsequently, the pandemic), I realized, for the first and so far still the only time in my life I might actually have a crush on someone. Emphasis on might. I never really figured out how I felt about the situation completely. All I knew was that me developing honest feelings for someone like that was and is something that simply does not happen, and when it does, it does not happen often, especially nowadays. It wasn’t all good news, though, as 2019 had other harder moments as well, the biggest one by far being some close family friends of ours losing their teenage son in a tragic accident over the summer of that year. While we were on vacation, I might add. I have never seen our family agree on something so quickly as when we all unanimously decided, yeah, we need to come home.
I know it sounds strange to want to make an entire thread for something like this, and it absolutely is, but the idea behind this thread isn’t just so I can deliver you guys some Yappuccinos. The title of this thread, and my post, may be all about the craziest year of my life up to this point, but what I actually want to do is create and provide a space where you all can share some of your own stories, too. Doesn’t have to specifically be a certain year, either. I just love hearing what people have to share and say about what they’ve seen in life. If anything else, I can at least rest easy knowing I’ve finally gotten around to writing this thread. Oh, would you look at that, 2019 was the year I joined both Smogon and Discord as well, how neat.