Welcome to The 12 Days of Thatz Not Okay, a special holiday edition of a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Check back tomorrow for our next seasonal installment. As always, please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity.weaver@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

Hear that sound? It's the squeal of a million fan fiction writers freaking out at the prospect of finally getting some respect. This week, a federal judge ruled that the world's most famous (and possibly most adapted) detective may enter the public domain.

It's no giant squid, but what the latest discovery in marine biology lacks in excitement for the layperson it makes up for in sheer quantity. Researchers studying the deep waters off the coast of Scotland have discovered four new species. Spoiler alert: they're all pretty slimy.

On Friday afternoon, a federal judge in Texas granted an injunction to two Baptist universities claiming that new laws mandating contraceptive coverage contradict their freedom of religion.

Following a year-long investigation into the December 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the state’s Department of Emergency Services has released several gigabytes of information gathered by law enforcement officials, including on-scene video footage, photographs, and previously sealed police reports.

People eat, fuck, say, and do weird shit and I live for watching them do all of it (and more) on TV. Above is a megamix of some of my favorite ridiculous, disgusting, hilarious, shady, inane, nonsensical, and Vera Farmiga-freaking moments of the year in television. I hope you enjoy it as much as the Basketball Wives enjoy saying, "It could go real right or real wrong." I hope you enjoy it as much as that impish little 2-year-old that says, "Wheeee!" loves coffee. (She is, to me, the mascot of not only this video and my TV coverage but 2013 as a whole.)

Bad news if you were one of the 40 million people whose credit and debit card information was stolen from Target earlier this month: It turns out the criminals also gained access to your PIN data, a fact that Target had previously denied.

This morning, we told you about our favorite things that we wrote in 2013. As it turns out, other things were written in 2013. Good things, even! Here are our favorites—from reported articles in respected magazines to perfect single tweets; from novels to personal blog posts.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the NSA's phone surveillance program is lawful, dismissing in the process a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the federal government.

Welcome to The 12 Days of Thatz Not Okay, a special holiday edition of a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Check back tomorrow for our next seasonal installment. As always, please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity.weaver@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

Senior CBS correspondent John Miller, who anchored 60 Minutes’ glowing profile of the National Security Agency earlier this month, is leaving the network to lead the NYPD’s new counter-terrorism division.

A father and his 15-year-old son drowned on Christmas day during a cave dive in north Florida. The two were reportedly testing new diving equipment the 15-year-old had received that morning as a Christmas gift.

"I'll be honest, I really wanted to win the Best Rap Video, but this Moonman right here stands for a lot more," the rapper Macklemore said earlier this year, holding the MTV Video Music Awards "Best Video With a Social Message" trophy. The honor was for the video accompanying his gay-equality anthem "Same Love," a song that he called "the most important record" out of everything he's written. "To watch this song in the last year spread across the world is a testament to what is happening right now in America on the forefront of equality," he told the crowd, echoing the song's self-important earnestness.

Florida, the alleged Sunshine State, has more indoor tanning salons than McDonald's restaurants, Publix supermarkets, CVS drugstores, and Bank of America branches. Visiting Aunt Rea in Boca this holiday? Get your leather on.

Looks like we published The Year in Mass Shootings too early: Last night, a Louisiana man went on a shooting rampage, killing his current wife, his ex-mother-in-law, his former boss, and injuring three others before committing suicide.

But how does the USA, USSR, Communist Vietnam & Nazi Germany all feels about subject-verb agreement?

It must suck to be a wealth advisor in "North America's Siberia," home to two of the country's ten poorest counties. Unless you find a way to woo the 1 percent of the 1 percent away from Pacific Heights and the Upper East Side.

Our best work here at Gawker is not always our most popular. Sometimes those two indicia—popularity and quality—are negatively correlated, and sometimes they're aligned. It's a crapshoot. Below, you will find the a list of the best stuff we came up with over the past 12 months. It's a grab-bag of searing criticism, straight dirt, personal assaults, intense narrative journalism, dark essays, a dead dog, jokes we couldn't get out of our heads until we put them on the site, gag headlines, and screaming goats. We hate to disappoint the loyal readers who expect, as one wag recently put it, "the short newsy posts typical of Gawker." But this is the stuff the staff was really into.

A powerful bomb exploded in downtown Beirut early Friday morning, killing at least six people and injuring more than 70. The attack targeted and killed Mahommad B. Chatah, a one-time ambassador to the United States and a former Lebanese finance minister who was critical of the Assad government in neighboring Syria.