2020 Retrospective

To say I wasn't looking forward to writing a summing up of this year would be an understatement. Not only has everything this year seemingly conspired to take the wind out of my sails but, most of the time, if felt as though there was precious little good to balance it all out.

Still, it's a tradition, even if I did let it slip last year. Time to get back on track...

2020 was pretty much a dumpster fire for the entire population of the planet thanks to COVID-19 and certain 'world-leading' governments' abject failures in dealing with it promptly, or in any reasonable and constructive way. While some of the swiftest outbreaks in Europe were on the Continent, the sluggish, ignorant and inconsistent response from the UK Government meant it got far worse than it ever should have done. This led to months of uncertainty, lockdown, misguided initiatives like 'Eat Out To Help Out', reopened schools and universities and, as a direct consequence, a second lockdown. Even as a relaxation of the guidelines was announced for Christmas, there were hints of a third lockdown in the New Year.

And yet this was still nowhere near as bad as the US, where outright denial of the problem and the abject, wilful ignorance in leadership led to many people behaving like idiots and deliberately flouting medical recommendations, perhaps in an effort to help usher in the End Times for the President's extremist (so-called 'Evangelical' and/or White Supremacist) supporters. Still, the UK saw no shortage of its own anti-lockdown protests and anti-mask activists, all working against what had been a somewhat successful programme of social distancing until the Government started making all kinds of stupid exceptions. That all this was happening while Brexit stumbled two steps backward every time it appeared to limp one step forward made the whole situation even more ridiculous.

On a more positive note, Courtney and I have been involved in University College London's Virus Watch scheme, and the emergence of a vaccine is promising... Though I suspect I had COVID-19 back near the start of the year, as I lost my sense of smell and taste almost entirely for a period of a few weeks. I've realised more recently that I have at least one post-COVID symptom - I intermittently hallucinate the smell of burning or cigarette smoke... and I'd been blaming my downstairs neighbours for months before Courtney confirmed that she can't smell a thing when I'm experiencing it.

And, naturally, when the vaccine was developed, the anti-vaxxers leapt on the idea that it had happened "too quickly", so clearly there must be something dodgy about it. Even the ridiculous old 'tracking chip concealed in a vaccine' conspiracy theory reared its head again. Side-effects were reported in a tiny minority of cases, but the same can be true of 'flu vaccines, not to mention any over-the-counter medication one might care to examine. It's all rather sad and, as of the time of writing, I don't see things getting back to normal very quickly in the New Year.

This year has been marked not only by the hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths due to the mishandling of the pandemic, but the unrelated deaths of a list of celebrities which is, frankly, too long for me to even try to do it justice. About the only positive on that score is that no-one I know died as a direct result of the pandemic, but have faced the risk of exposure thanks to the UK Government's incompetence.

Apologies for breaking with my 'no angst on this blog' rule but for me, personally, this year has been a largely downward-trending rollercoaster. I started the year at the tail end of a really fun part-time freelancing contract near Kings Cross, already convinced that I needed to look into alternative career prospects because work is quickly drying up in the field I've been in for about 25 years. Much of the role I've played within that field is - perhaps inevitably - increasingly being handled by software, in particular the automation of PDF acquisition and flightchecking. The role was only intended to be from June to October of 2019, but got extended due to ongoing negotiations with a new 'publishing partner' for the magazine. When the agreements were finalised, they introduced us all to their systems and - no surprise - much of my side of things was automated. Not that I was expecting an opportunity to get subsumed by the new publisher - I wouldn't presume to hope - but it was nevertheless disheartening to see the extent of their automation.

By the time that freelancing job ended, in mid-February, I had learned that a close friend (and former manager) of mine had died suddenly one evening, just three years after her mother died. She'd been ill for a while but, I gathered, had seemed to be improving. As I understand it, she fell asleep watching TV, and then didn't wake up. After she retired with her husband to the south coast back in 2018, we'd occasionally discussed the idea of Courtney and I visiting at some point, but never quite firmed up any plans. There are still days that I can't believe she's dead. I even had a dream about it at one point - seeing her out shopping and asking "Aren't you supposed to be dead?", to which her response was that it had all been a joke, because her husband had got bored in retirement. By the time of her funeral - which I was unable to attend - it had emerged that she'd had a very similar undetected infection as another friend of mine, who died back in 2007. In that case, the infection took hold as a result of the chemotherapy which cured her cancer.

Shortly after all this, we had been due to fly over to Canada to stay with Courtney's best mate and her partner, who moved over to Vancouver last year for the next phase in her career/life... This would have been the perfect distraction, and an opportunity to process and reflect... We'd made plans for all kinds of sightseeing, and even bought tickets to a concert, at a venue just down the road from their home... But all plans were cancelled when (first) UK lockdown eventually came into effect.

It's no surprise, then, that my mental health has been less than optimal for much of the year, and it's been a real struggle to get daily household tasks done, let alone anything creative. My exercise schedule frequently fell apart, I strongly suspect that I got scammed (as in overcharged) on some repair work for my flat in the autumn. I've had little enthusiasm for anything real-life, let alone videogame- or even toy-related, at precisely the time when I had plenty of time for all of them. None of my personal projects have received the attention they deserved. I managed to keep this blog ticking along reasonably well, at least over the summer, but each individual post has taken far longer to write than they normally would, and I've still not cleared by backlog of drafts (though I am finally down to single figures).

It surely didn't help that neither Earthrise nor Kingdom offered anything particularly exciting or innovative. Earthrise is pretty much a non-event as far as I'm concerned - well beyond mere G1 saturation - and with the crossover of figures between the G1 reboot that is War for Cybertron and the G1 reboot that is Studio Series '86, it feels as though the outgoing Design lead used Studio Series to bypass WfC's wave size limits to ensure as many as possible of these G1 reboot toys made it into production and onto the release schedules before his departure. There were plenty of figures I was interested in on principle - Sunstreaker, Grapple, the Battlechargers, Doubledealer and more - but got put off as soon as photos and YouTube reviews surfaced... And some of those reviews arrived surprisingly early, suggesting that Hasbro's choice of manufacturers in Vietnam has a very wide, very open back door for product distribution, and that none of the staff - not least security - are paid enough to give a damn. I've still only acquired two Earthrise figures: Optimus Prime and Cliffjumper. The former because, while the trailer is shockingly bad, the figure is one of the best contemporary Optimus Prime figures in any line, the latter because G1 Cliffjumper was the first TransFormers figure I ever bought and, with the exception of TransFormers Prime, he's been a Bumblebee repaint pretty much ever since.

Kingdom may even prove to be the last nail in the coffin for a potential Beast Wars reboot for the time being, since it seems unlikely that Hasbro would pursue that to its fullest when it's already been paid lip service within the last chapter of WfC. The evolution of Weaponisers into Fossilisers seemed like a joke when it was first announced, but the reality is even more ridiculous than the idea. The only thing I can say in Kingdom's favour is that it makes several of the Masterpiece Beast Wars figures completely redundant by offering decent-looking figures at a fraction of the cost. I'm starting to think BotBots was not Hasbro's worst decision in recent years. I have preordered Blackarachnia (because Femme-Bot) and will probably do the same with Airazor (because also Femme-Bot), but I'm just not sure about the other figures so far revealed. The rubbery outer layer of Megatron renders an otherwise good-looking figure a somewhat dubious prospect, Optimus Primal looks reasonable but doesn't excite me as much as I'd hoped, and the new Dinobot looks to be just as bad as every other version, just for different reasons. The rest are all easy passes.

On the Masterpiece front, both Starscream and Ratchet from the movie series looked amazing... but their final paint jobs were severely lacking and their engineering ended up seeming a little underdeveloped in places. The former already has a better-painted knockoff (albeit one prone to breaking at the ankle, I gather), so the same treatment for the latter is inevitable. While I generally prefer to buy official releases, to support those who actually worked on bringing the product to the shelves in the first place, MPM-10 Starscream looks positively amateurish compared to the KO.

After a handful of purchases early in the New Year, it wasn't till September that I actually bought any new toys. Two out of those three were Third Party offerings, thanks to Hasbro's increasingly mediocre output, and both were controversial in their own ways. Neither Unique Toys' take on Megatron from The Last Knight nor Big Firebird Toy's not-Arcee figure really look like TransFormers according to any traditional measure. The former was based on CGI that took the knight motif a little too far, while the latter was an undeniably sexualised femme-bot action figure with a transformation barely more complicated than the Deluxe class Generations Arcee toy. Both are, loosely speaking, Masterpiece analogues which are vastly higher quality than current official Masterpiece products.

But while it's not been a great year on the toy front (or the blogging-about-toys front, to be fair), it's been quite an amazing year in terms of fan-made translations of games for the Sega Saturn, which is still one of my favourite consoles. Following on from Policenauts and the Shining Force 3 trilogy, translations for the likes of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Sakura Wars, Lunar: Silver Star Story and Vandal Hearts have emerged, and a translation of Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was announced just this month. Princess Crown is still 'in progress', but I'm hoping a beta version of the patch sometime soon... It's pretty amazing to see so much life still in the machine, 20+ years after it was discontinued, and that's even before all the hardware innovations, such as the handful of Optical Drive Emulators that make it easier to access the machine's stellar back-catalogue of games.

Then again, in a small way, I'm actually assisting in a similar (albeit smaller) renaissance on the SAM Coupé, with two games in progress, and ideas - if not plans - for more. Motivation is my only real problem, as I struggle to make pixel art while the programmers are doing all the heavy lifting. One game is now very close to completion in terms of what needs doing - playtesting and bug hunting is still to come, but it's looking good. The other is theoretically in a good place, but actually plagued with as yet untraced bugs that are preventing its completion... While that's being worked on, I'm attempting to craft and intro and ending to fit what the creator of the original version had envisaged.

On the subject of games, while my firing up of consoles or PC games has been sporadic at best, my girlfriend and I were involved in a game of Vampire: The Masquerade for a while. Played over Google Meets, with one of her former Improv friends acting as the storyteller, the Chicago by Night campaign has been an interesting experience so far. Courtney quit the game quite early on, and I've withdrawn - temporarily - in an attempt to focus on personal projects. I'm hoping to get back to it soon in the New Year, but I've not made as much progress as I'd like on any of my projects...

So, on to the lists:

Highlights of 2020

1. Finally getting my hands on - G1 (Encore) Sky Lynx, Unique Toys' Dragoon and Big FireBird Toy's Nicee. Three very different figures, but each with their own unique charm.
   
2. Making it into a Top 40(ish) list - while it actually happened mid-last year, I only found out my blog had made an appearance in BotsVsCons Top 40+ TransFormers Websites in February of this year, which was a much-needed boost, at a time where it feels as though YouTube is making blogs like mine irrelevant. The majority of the feedback I actually get on the blog itself tends to be about my (over)use of italics, so their comments about by photography were very complimentary.
3. Promotion for my girlfriend - before 2020 took such a dramatic turn for the worse, Courtney got a promotion in her job. All the more special considering the troubles I've had in my line of work, and in finding an alternative.
   
4. Studio Series Blitzwing - given he had a scant few minutes of screen time, it felt as though a lot of effort went into the toy (albeit without licensing the likeness of his movie jet form)... Then again, a portion of his engineering has been used for the SS Cybertronian Starscream toy as well.
   
5. Third Party figures, generally - while not all are to my particular tastes, and very few are within my current budget, these companies still manage to impress me with their grasp of the core concept of 'TransFormers', while Hasbro frequently resort to sticking an action figure into (or onto) a vehicle shell, which the robot then carries as a backpack, or reusing the same basic transformation sequence for a whole series of toys.
6. Sharing more TransFormers TV shows with my girlfriend - while she's basically ambivalent toward the whole exercise, Courtney has mostly enjoyed the shows she's seen so far... We've got onto Season 2 of Animated, which has been fun for me to re-watch as well. She did fall asleep halfway through the Netflix Siege series, but I honestly can't blame her.
   
7. Getting back into Ren'Py - I gave this tool a try a couple of years back, but didn't get very far. Picking it back up again after a long break, I was able to make significantly better progress with a (somewhat) simpler project inspired by characters my girlfriend and I had created for an RPG we had been playing over the internet during lockdown.
8. Sega Saturn renaissance via fan translations - haven't spent as much time as I'd like playing some of these, but the work that's gone, and continues to go into them is nothing short of phenomenal.
   
9. Getting a tiny bit of sketching done - it's not much, and I'm still feeling some dread when I pick up a pencil, or attempt to teach myself to draw digitally, on my girlfriend's tablet, but it's more than I've done in a number of years.
10. Close to the finish line on at least one videogame - the one that's been in progress for a couple of years is now tantalisingly close to being complete... Just a few last tweaks to the levels and whatever last-minute improvements the programmer wants to work in. Very exciting!

Disappointments of 2020

1. UK Government's pandemic response - seemingly following Trump's example, Boris Johnson felt confident enough that COVID-19 would somehow pass us by, and so chose to do nothing to secure the UK against the virus until it was too late, and then somehow reached the conclusion that it was the MPs, rather than the frontline NHS staff who faced the pandemic head-on, who merited a pay increase. I'm pretty sure there have been votes of no confidence in a Prime Minister for lesser offences, so I'm baffled as to how this he continues in that role. Clearly no-one else wants the job right now... which is hardly surprising considering he's the also idiot that campaigned for Brexit, yet singularly failed to prepare for it, leading to month after month of delays and further uncertainty, on top of everything caused by the pandemic - not least my employment situation. The final straw, for a lot of people, was the introduction of a fourth tier to the previously three-tier quarantine system, which no doubt led to many families cancelling their Christmas plans.
   
2. The 2020 US Presidential Election - as above but this was, after all, as major a feature of this year as the pandemic. Just to be clear, I'm absolutely glad that Biden won... I'm just puzzled as to why it was by such a small margin, and why the Democrats needed such a Conservative candidate. As an outsider, it is genuinely shocking. Trump only won the Presidency back in 2016 because enough of the country was united against the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming President (or not even that, considering he lost the popular vote!), and the Republican Party sold their souls to a failed businessman and dubious Reality TV 'star' - whose only goal in life is to promote his own name/brand - in order to gain the Presidency, and who then spent his four years in office reminding anyone who'd listen about his 2016 victory, as if it was still news. His late-night Twitter tantrums come across like sundowning, and I strongly suspect there will be an Alzheimer's diagnosis in his future (assuming it hasn't already happened and is simply being covered up) or a hurried departure from the country. Possibly both.
   
3. Not visiting Canada - Like many others, we had to forgo any kind of holiday this year, and I've only seen my family via Skype calls since the original lockdown, but missing out on the trip to Canada was especially disappointing.
4. Cancelled events - Courtney and I had pledged to get out and do more stuff over the last couple of years, and we'd planned to attend a handful of events, concerts, etc. in 2020, all of which had to be cancelled or postponed.
   
5. Hasbro's decision-making - while I didn't make a formal list of predictions for 2020 the way I did for previous years, many of the dire predictions I've made about the TransFormers toyline over the last few years have turned out to be very close to the truth... and I'd hoped they might be worst case scenario predictions. In the short-term, I'm baffled by the choice to remake G1 characters in the style of the War for Cybertron toylines (some of whom actually appear in the WfC box art), but sold under the Studio Series banner, fatigued by the ongoing G1 focus, and thoroughly underwhelmed by most of the gimmicks. In addition to this, the bizarre crossovers with Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Top Gun resulted in underwhelming toys, two of which were retoolings of existing toys, the other was just underengineered and cheap-looking. News of an X-Men crossover really leaves me cold, not least because we've already seen myriad awful Marvel crossovers. The Street Fighter II crossover wasn't much better, being just a set of straight repaints, but was at least a little bit amusing. Most recently, the decision to launch a subline of Studio Series which is wholly devoted to 'Buzzworthy Bumblebee', yet composed entirely of re-releases of existing figures, seems utterly insane.
   
6. Underwhelming Masterpieces - The main Masterpiece line strayed much too far into cartoon accuracy for my tastes some years back, and the constant retreads of some figures (Bumblebee v2, Optimus Prime v3, Starscream v3) have just become tiresome. Meanwhile, the Masterpiece Movie line suffers from slack QC and budget-level paint jobs, and I suspect it's down to Hasbro wanting to cut their own costs, and putting the screws onto Takara Tomy to do the same via the Unification of World Brands. I think it's rather sad that many fans - myself included - now feel it's sometimes preferable to wait for the knockoff versions, which invariably have a superior paint job, if not improvements in engineering, with a less shocking pricetag. The arrival of an official Masterpiece Arcee was not the joyous occasion it should have been because it just wasn't as good-looking as some of the Third Party alternatives, despite being far more expensive... Personally, I don't think it's awful (certainly not 'saggy' as some have described it), it's just nowhere near as good as FansToys (characteristically overengineered) effort.
   
7. Technical difficulties - One of my external hard disks mysteriously failed back in August and, while I hope to be able to recover it at some point, I lost some documents of personal and professional importance, including several works-in-progress in Ren'Py. This also contributed to my depression.
   
8. Netflix's War for Cybertron series - marginally better than the Prime Wars series that Machinima shat out some years back, but Siege was boring, overly padded, had some of the worst voice acting I've heard in ages and didn't keep to its concept. Early signs are that Earthrise isn't even going to be living up to its name, with the crew of the Ark seemingly lost in space and running afoul of pirates. I dread to think what Kingdom will be like.
   
9. Not spending much time on my hobbies - in particular, before the first lockdown, I'd planned to look into clay modelling courses in my local area because I did a day of stonecarving years ago and enjoyed everything about it except the blisters. Aside from that, I've barely played any videogames, done precious little cooking (though I did managed to cook a Birthday meal for Courtney) and my work on a handful of videogames slowed to a crawl.
10. eBay experiences - I don't know how common this is, either in the UK or worldwide, but I was surprised by the number of users who would DM me asking for the lowest price I would be willing to accept on a Buy It Now/Best Offer listing, rather than just making an offer. Worse still, this would frequently happen within the first 72 hours of the listing going live. Isn't that kinda like asking a retailer what their close-out discount price would be, in the expectation that you can skip straight to paying that? I ended up deciding to keep a couple of figures purely because of this. UK buyers' ambivalence toward leaving feedback is also a little depressing.
    

Previous Predictions vs. Reality

1. Studio Series to continue and expand - Certainly wasn't wrong here... though I, personally, was disappointed by news of the line's sojourn into G1 territory with new toys of characters from the 1986 animated movie, which clearly should have been released in the Earthrise or Kingdom lines. Nice to see it expand with Cybertronian Starscream from the Bumblebee movie... and I'm hoping there will be Thundercracker and Skywarp repaints. Preferably not exclusives of any kind. Studio Series Dino, revealed in November, looks like an easy pass (most of his vehicle shell ends up on his back) and news of a Studio Series interpretation of The Fallen doesn't exactly fill me with excitement... but I'll be interested to see where they take the line in future.
   
2. War for Cybertron will be just another disappointing rehash - Pretty much hit the nail on the head with this one... While CHUG had covered a majority of G1 characters since its inception in 2006 (with a special focus on prominent characters in the IDW comics, it seemed), the War for Cybertron lines seemed incapable of keeping to their defined path, likely because it was never properly defined in the first place. Siege omitted characters which then only appeared in Earthrise, which then omitted even more characters who then couldn't appear in Kingdom because of the ill-conceived Beast Wars crossover. The one surprising and positive element of Siege - the Weaponisers - was followed up with uninspiring mini-bases in Earthrise, and the utterly dopey Fossilisers of Kingdom. So much wasted potential, and surely proof enough that G1 has now been milked dry of any real opportunity for further novelty.
   
3. Improved Distribution? - This was always a vain hope, but the piss-poor handling of things like Amazon exclusives continues, and I had to keep an eye on various websites to ensure I didn't miss out on Studio Series Blitzwing. Hasbro really don't seem to give a damn about anything outside the US... and their distribution there is bad enough, going by some reports.
   
4. Movie focus for Third Parties? - Not as much as I'd expected, as it happens... but there are a number of companies producing their own version of solo movie Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, as well as additional takes on Age of Extinction/The Last Knight Optimus Prime, wholly original WWII versions of several movie 'bots, many of the Cybertronian forms of the Decepticons seen in the Bumblebee movie, and even attempts at triple-changing Shatter and Dropkick. However, following the high-profile police takedown of WeiJiang, several 3P companies seemed to start pulling out - Unique Toys announced that their figured based on AoE Galvatron would be their last, and Dragoon had its final production run/restock.
   
5. Slowing down? - Very much self-imposed due to my current unemployment and a lack of display space, but there's actually not a great deal of official product that I'm interested in at the moment. That said, I have been trimming my collection by taking some of my figures out of storage and putting them up on eBay. I will have ended the year with fewer TransFormers in my collection than I had at the start.
   
6. TFNation to expand and/or relocate - The crew have said several times that they don't currently intend to move away from the Hilton Metropole, not least because booking the space and organising all the necessary sundries becomes much more complicated with larger venues, while the hotel offers everything they need in one package. COVID-19 caused a shift to an online event for 2020, using recordings from previous shows, but I don't think that really counts.
   
7. Fun Publications to bounce back with a new, unofficial BotCon - Either it's still a work-in-progress, or it was stalled by the pandemic... Here's hoping for more news... soon.
   
8. Star Trek: Discovery will continue to divide the 'fanbase'... again! - I can't speak for the fanbase, but it's certainly dividing my opinion. Objectively speaking, I mostly enjoy it... but it doesn't feel like Star Trek anymore. The moment they introduced the idea of a sect of Klingons protecting a 'Time Crystal' in season 2, Discovery ceased to be Science Fiction and plummeted into the dubious realms of Space Fantasy. Season 3 seems intent on ripping off Andromeda (another Roddenberry production), and I'm half expecting the phenomenon known as 'The Burn' to have some connection - either direct or tangential - with Michael Burnham, because pretty much everything fucking does in that show. Plus, the in-your-face, capital-i Inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters has been handled remarkably clumsily, and with absolute disrespect for Star Trek's very inclusive past.
   
9. Another change of direction for Doctor Who? - I have to confess I'm having a harder time remembering what happened in the 2020 season of Doctor Who than any of the previous, including the mostly forgettable Capaldi era (much as I loathe the Tennant era, I cannot claim that his scenery-chewing tenure wasn't memorable). They certainly proposed some controversial ideas, none of which had an especially rewarding payoff so far, but it's still far from unrecoverable just yet. The current showrunner still needs to up his game in terms of choosing writers and approving scripts, but I'm curious to see what the next season hold. I'm particularly looking forward to Captain Jack Harkness popping back again for the New Years episode, and hope they do him justice, rather than making him the butt of all the jokes, in an attempt to make the trio of companions look better.
   
10. News on the next TransFormers movie - Sadly not, it seems... At least, beyond the announcement that a Director and Screenwriter have been chosen. It appears that Bumblebee wasn't sufficiently profitable for the franchise to remain a priority for Paramount. Plus, y'know, the pandemic probably put a spanner in the works. Perhaps they should try a G.I. JOE reboot, or a M.A.S.K. origin story (ideally one that makes use of KSI-style reverse-engineered Cybertronian tech for its transforming vehicles) instead.
    
11. Big Movies, Big Disappointments - Wow... I can't remember when I last even went to the cinema... But I guess that alone counts as a big disappointment. I was looking forward to Wonder Woman 1984, but it's been shunted over to a streaming service that doesn't seem to be available in the UK... and I've been hearing it's not that good anyway...
    

Predictions for 2021
At this stage, it's remarkably difficult to make any predictions about anything next year - life is still up in the air due to COVID-19 - and Hasbro are unlikely to reveal where the TransFormers brand is headed after Kingdom until the toyline crawls into its final stages next year. Several events have set tentative dates in 2021, though even these may have to shift... Nevertheless:

1. A third lockdown - Given that London is already in Tier 4 due to the Government's shambolic and inconsistent response to the pandemic, it's inevitable that Christmas and New Year will lead to another lockdown, to one degree or another. 
2. UK Government shakeup? - Near the end of the year, it emerged that a couple of 'influential' Tories either resigned or got the boot. This was followed by suggestions that perhaps this would give Boris Johnson the opportunity to be Prime Minister on his own merits, rather than constantly doing as these 'influential' colleagues told him. Problem is, he's just another rich, entitled ignoramus shat out by the Bullingdon Club, and therefore has no merits. Around the middle of November, rumours started circulating that Johnson himself might be out by Spring 2021... Fingers crossed.
   
3. Getting a new job - I'm hoping this will happen as soon as possible!
4. Getting out and about again - assuming the COVID-19 vaccine is effective and life can gradually return to normal.
   
5. Presenting at least one complete game for the SAM Coupé at a small retro gaming event - this now depends more on the hard work of the programmers, though I will be tweaking graphics till the very last moment, knowing me... Aside from that, we're currently all still at the mercy of COVID-19, so it's difficult to say. Once these two games are out of the way, the programmers have their own pet projects which I may be assisting with. After that, who knows? I have lots of ideas, and it'd be nice to turn some of them into reality. 
6. Completing my first Ren'Py game - because, sadly, I haven't already (rewrites are complicated, art dread)... and I'd quite like to make a start on a follow-up as soon as possible, building on what I've learnt.
7. Courtney on a quiz show? - she's already been on University Challenge, but she and some friends recently applied to be on Only Connect... Could be fun.
   
8. The next TransFormers line will preview (or be 'leaked') during the summer - I'm just hoping it's not more fucking G1 reboots... though that would give me the opportunity to focus my attention elsewhere. Since 2022 will be the 20th Anniversary of TransFormers Armada, it'd be nice to see Hasbro revisit that franchise... There were images of a new Takara Tomy version of the truck part of Armada prime, but no conclusive indication of whether the trailer - and thereby his combined, 'Superpants' form - would also be produced. But since Fans Hobby have both that and an Armada Megatron in progress, Hasbro and Takara Tomy had better make up their minds. One thing I will say with some certainty: It ain't gonna be Beast Wars Revisited.
   

In summing up, I sort of loop back to the bulk of text at the start. Due to my ongoing struggles with motivation and my tendency to procrastinate (some of the last few toy posts have taken weeks to write), I've sought help from my local mental health services, who have also put me in touch with some people who offer help and support for getting back to work. Due to my poor finances, my girlfriend is basically taking care of the household until I'm earning again.

Theoretically, things are looking slightly more positive on a personal level, though the general state of the country isn't looking so great, particularly in the light of the discovery of new strains of COVID-19. I really wish I could sign off on a much more assuredly positive note but, for the moment, I'm finding it uncharacteristically hard to find any silver linings. At the very least, my situation is basically stable, and I'm hopeful that the New Year will bring improvements eventually, not least a return to whatever will pass for 'normal' in the post-pandemic world.