“New year, who dis?”

As we turn our calendars to January 2019, that’s a phrase you should be saying to some not-so-great trends and people who were popular in this medium-key trash year.

Before we say goodbye to 2018, let’s make an effort to start fresh by leaving behind a few negative memories and abandoning things that make life more unpleasant.

SEE ALSO: 50 things to be thankful for in 2018

Not sure where to start? No worries! Here are 13 things you should consider leaving behind to start the year off on the right foot.

1. Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook, quite frankly, is exhausting and I think the time to cut ties with the harmful social media platform has finally come. Even aside from the whole Russia interfering with the 2016 election mess, the company’s made so many mistakes this year alone.

If you’ve been thinking about deleting your account but are on the fence, here are some recent events to consider. In 2018 there’s been a hack that “directly affected” millions of accounts, a weird bug that dug up past messages, an internal memo released by a former employee that accused Facebook of failing its black employees and users, Zuck’s beef with Apple, company documents that were seized by the UK government, that hearing Zuck straight up didn’t attend, and an embarrassing PDF that revealed Facebook considered selling access to data, to name a few.

Why are we still wasting time on this problematic platform? Write down some important birthdays so you don’t forget, make sure your close friends and coworkers have your phone number so they can invite you directly to any gatherings, and delete it from your life. You’ll feel free.

2. The term “hot take”

Merriam-Webster defines “hot take” as “a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction,” usually in response to some news. If that’s true, then hooooo boy have people strayed from the proper usage of the term.

Hot Take: These days people think everything‘s a hot take. It’s become a synonym for any opinion, which is wrong because not all opinions are sensational and most times sticking the word “hot” in front of “take” doesn’t make your take hot, it just makes you sound like an ass.

In 2019, let’s all try to limit our dubbing of hot takes to like, at most, one per month.

3. Those sign bunny memes

If you’ve spent any portion of 2018 on Twitter, odds are you’ve seen those memes of the lil ASCII bunnies holding ASCII protest signs. I regret to inform you that while the tweets are extremely cute, they’re also kind of old, take too much effort to successfully compose, and are overused. It’s time to let them go and make room for all the new meme trends we’ll undoubtedly feel pressured to take part in.

4. Bad cooking videos

Cooking videos are taking over the internet. On nearly every website you visit, footage of hands assembling ingredients autoplays. 

Whatever happened to our love for actual cooking shows on the Food Network that take you through the lengthy process of assembling a dish rather than simply dumping spices from cute little bowls or snapping to magically crack eggs?

There are an overwhelming amount of Tasty-style videos in the world in 2018. We don’t need a video for every food, people. And we definitely don’t need videos for recipes that have less that three ingredients or use no seasoning. We’re better than that. I hope.

Also, I’d like to shout a huge old “NOPE” to those gross “Meals Cooked in Mouth” videos. Keep those in 2018, please.

5. Gritty hate 

The Philadelphia Flyers introduced their new hairy orange mascot, Gritty, this year. And while many people adore the large, eccentric sports enthusiast, others are growing a bit tired of Gritty’s continual antics and strong social media presence.

If you’re a Gritty hater, leave those negative vibes behind in the new year. Gritty is a nice fun thing and we could all use as many of those as we can get. And if you know someone who’s anti-Gritty and refuses to reconsider, honestly maybe it’s time to stand up for what you love and leave them behind.

6. Unnecessary social media updates

Let’s set some social media parameters for the new year, shall we? How about we kick of 2019 by vowing to post … less. Or rather, make an effort to only post what’s absolutely necessary.

Do you absolutely need to tweet a minute-by-minute update on your delayed flight? Must you live stream every time you unbox something you ordered from Amazon? And do you need to post the same exact content to your Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram every single day? Feels like a hard no. Take a break once in a while. And give your followers a break, too.

7. Drawn out revival rumors

The last few years, the entertainment industry has been all about revivals. We’ve seen a bunch of TV shows — like American Idol, Full House, Gilmore Girls, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Twin Peaks, Will and Grace, and more — make their return to the screen, and though they’re not always successful, there’s no denying some, like Queer Eye, have been an absolute delight.

But months and sometimes even years before a revival is confirmed, fans have to deal with a constant, confusing stream of revival rumors.

I’m a die-hard fan of The Office, for example, but I don’t know how many more “X actor is down for a revival. Will it happen?” headlines my heart can take without bursting. It’s an emotional roller coaster and I’m exhausted.

I know it’s exciting to hear the stars of a show you love would be open to bringing it back, but maybe we don’t have to ask the actors about it in every single interview. Just let us know when the revival is and then we’ll celebrate!

8. Cringey beauty trends

Nails that resemble combs, corkscrews, human teeth, and even HAIR? Eyebrows shaped like coat hangers, fishtails, right angles, and halos? No thank you! 2018 has given us some weird AF beauty trends, so in 2019 maybe we can take a break and tone down the shock value a bit.

9. Your love of plastic straws

From the looks of 2018, the straw-pocolypse, or world free from plastic straws, is coming. This year  plastic straw bans spread across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Businesses like McDonald’s and Starbucks also made efforts to ban plastic straws in hopes of preserving the environment and cutting down on the world’s harmful and overwhelming amount of single-use plastic waste. And even Disney got in on the action.

Why not get prepared for the anti-plastic straw movement and stock up on reusable water bottles and straws now? This guide will help. And you can find more environment-friendly tips to manage your waste here.

10. The Paul brothers

The internet is long, long overdue for a breakup with Logan and Jake Paul. Over the years the two controversial YouTube sensations have shown they’ll do just about anything to get some video views.

After Logan Paul came under fire for the insensitive Aokigahara forest vlog he posted in January, he spent the rest of the year uploading other offensive videos, trolling celebs, and delivering insincere-sounding apologies. Enough is enough, people. It’s time to stop consuming Paul content.

11. High heeled shoes that shouldn’t have heels

In 2019 can we please stop trying to make high heels work in every possible circumstance? Some shoes are not meant to be transformed into heels, and that’s OK. Crocs for example. I mean, look at this!

12. Strict beverage seasons

Summer is also known as rosé and iced coffee season by the beverage police, but both of those drinks are delicious and shouldn’t be limited to a single season. If “frozen hot chocolate” is allowed to be sold in the winter why can’t people enjoy iced coffee? And we don’t cancel hot coffee in the summer so it seems a little hypocritical, no? 

2019 should be the year of breaking down strict beverage barriers and allowing people to drink whatever they want, whenever they want without judgement. (Except for explicitly seasonal drinks like the pumpkin spice or peppermint mocha lattes, which have seasonal-specific flavors).

13. Spending too much time online

Many people (myself included) spend hours a day using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Social media has undoubtedly become addicting and while no one likes FOMO, it’s healthy to take a break.

Sure, you might have to stay up-to-date with online culture for your job, but on the weekend? Try limiting your time online, or at least being more aware of how long you spend using social media apps with some help from you phone settings. And, hey, if you get rid of your Facebook you’re already ahead of the game on this one. Good job.

Here’s to better year!

Spoilers follow for Love, Simon; Anna and the Apocalypse; and Ralph Breaks the Internet.

“You really piss me off, you know? Because you know they shit all over everybody, including you. I can’t believe you’d be this stupid. He’s going to use your ass and throw you away! God, I would have died for you. You can’t do this and respect yourself. You just can’t.”

In the character of Duckie from Pretty in Pink, screenwriter John Hughes gave us the siren call of the Nice Guy. The Nice Guy is Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s Snape from Harry Potter. 

SEE ALSO: What loving Severus Snape taught me about myself

Typically a bit of a social outcast, he seems sweet enough—he many even be your best friend—until it twigs that you’re romantically interested in someone who’s not him. Then the facade crumbles, revealing an insecure, entitled jerk who simply can’t fathom that the woman he’s into may have feelings towards him that stop at the platonic. 

He’s been so nice, after all.

The toxic masculinity inherent in the “Nice Guy” has begun to be challenged. 

What’s particularly telling, and particularly troubling, about media examples of Nice Guys from years past is that their creators don’t seem to recognize the character type as the troubling, misogynist trope that it is. 

The original ending of Pretty in Pink had Andie (Molly Ringwald) end up with Duckie (John Cryer) instead of rich-boy Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Director Howard Deutch only changed the ending after girls literally booed the pair ending up together at a test screening. (The ideal Pretty in Pink ending has Andie ditching both men in favor of hanging out with Annie Potts, but that’s neither here nor there.) Snape’s unrequited love of Harry’s mother Lily is seen within the Harry Potter series as tragic and romantic, rather than obsessive. And sweet ’n’ lovable Xander can slut-shame Buffy as much as he wants without anyone ever calling him out on it. 

But the times, they are a’changing. In 2018, the Nice Guy? He wasn’t so nice.

In movies like Love, Simon; Anna and the Apocalypse; and even Ralph Breaks the Internet, the toxic masculinity inherent in the “Nice Guy” concept has begun to be challenged. 

In Love, Simon, there’s a subplot involving a teenager named Martin (Logan Miller) who’s obsessed with magic and new girl Abby (Alexandra Shipp) in equal measure. He’s a Duckie for the 21st century, someone whose borderline-stalking attitude towards the object of his attention is counterbalanced by a social outcast status and quirky demeanor that renders him, if not entirely likable, at least more pathetic than actively intimidating.

Or at least it would, if Love, Simon didn’t fully acknowledge the toxicity of Martin’s behavior. When he discovers Simon’s (Nick Robinson) homosexuality and uses that knowledge to blackmail him into getting close to Abby, the film recognizes it for the horrible act that it is. A grand gesture at a football game leads to him being gently rejected by Abby, which in turn causes Martin to out Simon to the whole school as a means of distracting his classmates away from his own humiliation. 

What can a socially awkward nerd really do? The answer, we now realize, is “a lot.”

Martin is not a wholly unsympathetic character by the end of the film. But his clear regret at his past behavior is depicted less as a brushing-aside of what he’s done than an indication that, with a little bit of hard work and self-examination, he can stop being such a massive tool. 

In the end, Martin doesn’t get the girl.

Of course, 2018 wasn’t the first year that people realized Nice Guys are actually entitled nightmares. The villain in the criminally underrated 2010 animated film Megamind is a card-carrying Nice Guy who thinks becoming a superhero will get his crush object to like him and flips straight into supervillain mode when he realizes that’s not the case. 

The starkest case of the Nice Guy-as-Villain can be found in Nacho Vigalondo’s 2016 film Colossal, which is masterful in its gradual unveiling of just how much aw-shucks hometown boy Oscar (Jason Sudekis) resents main character Gloria (Anne Hathaway) for her success and her lack of interest in him.

The defense of the Nice Guy goes something like this: They’re not all assholes! Some of them are just socially awkward dorks! That’s the case in director John McPhail’s zombie Christmas musical Anna and the Apocalypse. 

Lead character Anna (Ella Hunt) is pined after by John (Malcolm Cumming), her best friend who’s clearly been into her for years but is too shy to say anything about it. Then the zombie apocalypse happens. You know where this is going: A brief respite from the chaos. A confession of love. Ella and John facing the undead hordes as a newly minuted couple. 

Nah. Anna’s subversion of the Nice Guy trope is much more low-key than what we get in Love, Simon or Colossal, but at the same time it’s more authentic-feeling, zombies be damned. 

It goes by quickly. Anna makes it clear, without putting it in so many words, that she knows how John feels about her, and that she loves him, too—as a friend. He’s clearly sad, but he doesn’t berate her or attempt to argue her into giving him a shot. The subject is closed. John could have been written as a Nice Guy. Instead, he’s just… a nice guy.

Another coulda-been Nice Guy who turns out to be actually nice is Wreck-It Ralph, who skirts close to the platonic version of this trope in Ralph Breaks the Internet. The romantic element isn’t there, but the other building blocks are. 

Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) wants to move from her quiet arcade game to the more exciting Slaughter Race, located in the scary world of the internet. Her best friend Ralph (John C. Reilly) gets possessive, trying to convince Vanellope that Slaughter Race is awful before eventually going behind her back to infect the game so she won’t want to live there. It’s the Nice Guy, Friendship Version.

Ralph’s jealousy manifests as a King Kong-style monster determined to keep Vanellope with him, her own feelings be damned. Confronted by the worst version of himself, Ralph realizes that his behavior was motivated not by anything Vanellope did, but by his own insecurities. In the end, he accepts that Vanellope has the right to make decisions about her own life, and the pair of them are happier for it.

In Love, Simon and Colossal, the Nice Guy is laid bare as the monster—literally, in Colossal’s case—that he is. In Anna and the Apocalypse, he’s shown as he should be, responding to unrequited affection in a healthy and mature fashion. And in Ralph Breaks the Internet, we see a man actively work through his Nice Guy tendencies, realize the toxic emotional well they spring from, and come out the other side a happier human being (well, collection of pixels) capable of forming much healthier relationships. 

So what happened? It’s easy to point to the increased presence of women at the table. Nice Guys exist in real life, after all, as the supposed feminist allies who whine about being “friendzoned.” It makes sense that women would be more sensitive to the ways in which the fictional Nice Guy veers dangerously close to the real-life creeper. Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, the book upon which Love, Simon is based, was written by Becky Albertalli. Pamela Ribon co-wrote Ralph Breaks the Internet. 

But both those movies were directed by men. Male writer/directors are behind both Colossal and Anna and the Apocalypse. And it’s not like women are immune from perpetuating the Nice Guy trope. (Hi, J.K. Rowling.) 

Where you can find a more direct cause for this widespread reexamination of the insidious nature of the Nice Guy is in the changing realities of male nerd culture. 

You used to be able to shrug aside the Nice Guy’s more stalker-y tendencies—so the media they appeared in told us—because they were just so damn harmless. What can a socially awkward nerd really do? The answer, we now realize, is “a lot.” Filtered through Reddit and 4chan, a group that used to be perceived as scrappy underdogs gave birth to GamerGate and the alt-right. 

In 1986, Duckie called Andie stupid and told her she was unworthy of respect for daring date to a man who wasn’t him. Thirty years later, he’d have gone straight to r/incels to whine about “sex redistribution,” “chads,” and “soy boys.” 

The Nice Guy was never nice. The movies are just now starting to catch up.

Each year, Japanese whalers haul hundreds of harpooned whales aboard their giant 8,145-ton vessel, the Nisshin Maru. And for decades, they’ve killed most of these whales in the open Antarctic seas, under the guise of performing scientific “research.”

But now Japan is changing course, in a curious way.

On Wednesday Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced that the nation will retreat from killing whales in the Antarctic waters. Instead, the Japanese have dropped the pretense of hunting whales for research and say they will strictly hunt whales in waters around Japan — mostly for the whales’ meat.

“It’s a bit of a strange kind of move,” Carl Safina, a marine ecologist at Stonybrook University, said in an interview, noting that Japan still intends to hunt whales, but just not in certain whale-rich waters.   

While this leaves the Southern Hemisphere free of whaling for the first time in centuries — a true conservation victory — the Japanese continued killing of whales still has dubious legal merit. 

Following Wednesday’s announcement, Japan will soon be leaving the United Nation’s International Whaling Commission — the world body in charge of whale conservation. This commission halted commercial whaling over 30 years ago, in 1986. Since then, nearly every nation in the world has stopped commercial whaling.

But now Japan will be largely on its own — a sort of whaling renegade unbound from the global agreement and still killing whales — though in its own waters.

“Now, they’re blatantly criminal operations,” Paul Watson, a captain and president of the anti-poaching organization Sea Shepherd, said in an interview. Watson has repeatedly led campaigns to intervene during Japanese whaling operations on the open ocean.

“Basically they will be pirates,” added Carolina Castro, a Sea Shepherd media manager, over email.

Yet, by leaving the International Whaling Commission, Japan will no longer be beholden to the commission’s conservation rules, regardless of the reality that most every nation in the world has stopped hunting whales. 

But even if Japan did remain bound to the whaling conservation agreement, there’s no world power that would to stop Japan from whaling in its own waters, specifically Japan’s “Exclusive Economic Zone,” which stretches 200 miles from its coast. 

“The trouble with all the conservation agreements is that there’s no enforcement mechanism for almost any of them,” said Safina.

SEE ALSO: 2018 takes the podium as one of the hottest years on record. Let’s look deeper.

Iceland and Norway — the other two whaling nations — also kill whales with impunity. No other government intervenes. Rather, nations can impose economic sanctions, if they wanted. For instance, the U.S. Magnuson‐Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006 states that foreign nations should be punished for engaging in illegal fishing. 

While commercial whaling likely won’t ever be stopped by another government, it now exists as a taboo, a fringe, antiquated practice that eventually might die out on its own.

“There’s not any real need for anything from a whale in modern industrialized civilization,” said Safina. “Our respect for life on the planet should make it seem appalling to kill the grandest living things that have ever existed.”

The good news  

For those seeking to protect whales — whose numbers were vastly diminished in the 20th Century — the Japanese decision is welcome news.

Whaling will continue, but there will be less of it. 

“The silver lining is they don’t feel like killing whales much anymore — they’re only going to kill them in Japan’s territorial waters,” said Safina. “I don’t find this to be very upsetting.”  

“They’ve retreated to their own economic zone,” said Watson. “It’s wonderful news from my point of view.”

Although Japan’s greater motives aren’t known, there’s potential that they intend to wind down their whaling operations, possibly for good. After all, the business, with diminished demand, is not likely turning much of a profit — if any profit.

“It hasn’t made money for decades,” noted Watson.

Rather, Watson argues modern whaling is driven by political influence. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe is from a whaling district, he said, and also noted that both a strong political board and whaling union keep the practice afloat.

“It’s all political — it doesn’t make any economic sense,” said Watson. “There are thousands of tons of refrigerated whale meat that can’t be sold.”

“Maybe they are sick of doing it”

Safina wonders if the recent move is to help the Japanese “save face.” In other words, perhaps the Japanese want to gradually get out of the whaling, but don’t want to appear weak or influenced.

“Maybe they are sick of doing it,” said Safina. “But they can’t just stop because that would make it look like they bowed to pressure, and they are obsessed with saving face — the Japan government is obsessed with it.”

Whatever Japan’s longer-term aims, the retreat of hunting will be of benefit to whales, which will now be free from hunting in the entire Southern Hemisphere. 

And more whales are of considerable value to the ocean’s food web, which benefits from a process called the whale pump: Whales fertilize the surface waters with large plumes of feces, replenishing the surface waters and as consequence, making them more productive. 

“There’s never too many whales,” said Watson.