It's been a banner year for Silicon Valley's blog of record—investor cash is flowing, and incomprehensible gibberish companies are flourishing. As are incomprehensible gibberish articles about them.

Before Kno, an education startup, was sold for chump change yesterday, it was on its way to the top. Don't take my word for it: just look at all the "smart" "tech" "experts" who poured $100 million and thousands of fawning words into the turkey.

In 2011, TechCrunch founder and Bully-in-Chief Michael Arrington gave an off the record talk to an audience of powerful tech CEOs. Details of unsavory comments leaked. Later that year, he did it again, and now we have the closed-doors video of Arrington's corruption, in his own words.

TechCrunch is wrapping up another Disrupt conference (this time in Berlin), and the man who started it all has some very public, very not-nice things to say about the website he created.

Live, at this week's TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2013. I guess this is still a step up from Titstare, but still not the best way to represent yourself.

This weekend, the Level Playing Field Institute brought together a group of middle and high school students "from minority groups underrepresented in computer science" for a brainstorming meetup and tech project competition. Here's what TechCrunch wrote about instead:

In 2011, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington was fired from his own website for reasons including flagrant conflicts of interest over his newly hatched VC firm, CrunchFund. But he never really left. For every year since his firing, Arrington's used the TechCrunch Disrupt conference to help his wallet.

Conflict of Interest 3.0: the winner of TechCrunch's vaunted Disrupt Battlefield startup competition is financially backed by TechCrunch's pugnacious founder, Michael Arrington—it is a matter of pure coincidence that Arrington judged the competition. How much longer are we going to take this seriously?

As a lovely followup to recent discussions of gender inclusivity in tech, here's the first presentation from the AOL-owned TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 startup conference: an app called Titstare, presented by two grinning Australian dudes, exactly as tasteless as it sounds.

The team at AOL's intrepid startup newsroom never shies away from thinly rewritten press releases—don't mess with a good formula. But today, TechCrunch reaches new heights/depths in the art: the press release as corporate fan fiction, imagining a cool new world in which Google replaces humans.

Every app wants to be like Snapchat: it came out of nowhere, without much planning, and now devours attention spans across North America. It's also worth $800 million, mostly through word of mouth. Most companies can't copy this, but they'll sure lie about it.

For the past couple of years, bored tech writers have been telling this spooky ghost story about teens bored with Facebook. Today, during Facebook's latest earnings report, Zuckerberg denied the youth exodus, and TechCrunch's resident Facebook sleeper agent can barely keep it in his teen pants.

This is why stuff like this matters: less than a month after investor MG Siegler announced his move to Google, he's written a TechCrunch column pillorying Apple for looking dull. There's no mention—by Siegler or TechCrunch—of the fact that he works for Apple's rival.

No, it's not just you—this headline doesn't really make any sense. And yet that's explanation from TechCrunch's Josh Constine, the FB communications team who moonlights as a blogger. It's not Facebook's fault that nobody wants to phone Home. Blame those seductive iPhones.

Apple shopper, ever-conflicted TechCrunch blogger and venture capitalist MG Siegler just took on a third job: partner at Google Ventures. But don't worry, he says, everything is going to stay just the way it was: blogging about the industry he bankrolls, not a scruple in sight.

Last week, we reported that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington would skip his Disrupt conference for the first time ever. We were wrong: Yesterday, he showed up on stage. It seems that whatever hiccups were getting in the way of his making an appearance have been resolved. One of those hiccups: Our own Adrian Chen.

Former Facebook bigwig and current investor Chamath Palihapitiya isn't pulling any punches at this week's TechCrunch Disrupt, where many a punch is typically pulled. He's disgusted with what's called tech innovation now, saying "we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started."

As the sun began to rise in New York, Katie Clark-AlSadder, Senior Account Manager at SHIFT Communications, broke my heart: my press credentials to Disrupt 2013 are revoked for no reason. It's time for the healing to begin—but what'd we do wrong?

As a preamble to this week's Disrupt conference in New York, TechCrunch is hosting a "hackathon"—one of those dire geek sweatshops wherein coders create small snippets of ideas, and then hawk them before people with money. It's sort of like speed dating meets department store liquidation sale. But one chose to use his time to basically tell everyone to fuck off.

Mike Arrington's jowls and brash questions have been a staple of TechCrunch's annual green-tinted festival of self-congratulation. But a well-informed source tells us the former main act won't be attending this year.