2021 Retrospective

If anyone had suggested that 2021 might actually be worse than 2020 - in any way, not simply related to COVID-19 - I don't think I'd have had a particularly hard time believing them. While I'm generally an optimistic person, I'm also very cynical and have seen sufficient evidence that certain public figures are motivated wholly by self-interest, which inevitably leads to disaster.

Last year got off to a shit start with the (unrelated) death of a close friend before the UK Government woke up enough to take even the most basic and obvious measures to slow the spread of the virus. Early this year, I learned that a former colleague - specifically, the guy I hired to take over my role when I quit my last full-time job - had died of COVID-19 back in 2020. He was a great bloke, and was such a perfect fit for the team, but I'd felt very guilty leaving him in that situation with just a few days of handover... Just learning that he'd died was crushing enough for me, but I also learned he had been engaged to be married this year, so I can't imagine how awful it all was and probably still is for his fiancée. I don't know the circumstances of how he became ill, but I'd imagine a more consistent response from our government might have prevented it.

Back in February, I developed some nasty dental issues that resulted in the extraction of one of my molars. Long story short, I clench my jaw in my sleep, and this led to a crack forming at one end of the tooth which ran right the way into the root, but was impossible to see because my molars have high peaks in the corners, quite deep troughs in between, and are very closely aligned. When an abscess developed, I experienced not only pain in that one tooth in my lower jaw, but referred pain across half my upper jaw as well. Once the Dentist had removed it, she saw there would have been no way to rescue the tooth - not only did it come out all too easily, the crack was too deep for a root canal to have made a difference - so, regretful as it was, the extraction had been absolutely necessary. When the same sort of thing happened to the opposite tooth, barely a month later, that one appeared to be in a more recoverable state. Another abscess developed, requiring several courses of antibiotics because the best appointment they could offer me outside of an emergency was months away. Since they were of very limited efficacy, I was bumped up the treatment list in an effort to avoid another extraction. A root canal was performed in mid-May, over the course of two appointments, but the tooth subsequently fractured (just two weeks later, during lunch at a restaurant over the late May Bank Holiday weekend), and the fragments were extracted at the earliest opportunity.

While my blogging hasn't been as consistent as I'd like - either here or elsewhere - my other creative efforts continued to be... sporadic... One of the games I've been working on for the SAM Coupé seemed tantalisingly close to completion in the early half of the year, held up partly by the programmer's health, work commitments and his moving house during the summer/autumn. The final stages progressed very slowly, with some last-minute graphical updates from me and the late decision to scrap and replace one screen. Between September and December, the estimated completion date slipped from somewhere before the end of the year to sometime in January, though my own lack of progress on the redesigned title screens, if nothing else, may yet throw that into doubt... 

The other game is stalled somewhat due to the uncertainty about our legal position in creating the game in the first place. We have the blessing of the guy who wrote the original, back in the 1990s, but there were concerns - overblown, I think - that we might be targeted with a cease-and-desist if we were to publicise it too much, because the original has been made available via some kind of retro game streaming service. Given that SAM Coupé conversions of top-tier games like Street Fighter and Rick Dangerous have emerged without any negative ramifications, I suspect a conversion of a little-known C64 budget game is unlikely to attract significant attention. Additionally, the programmer had hit a bit of a coding brick wall, which he attempted to negotiate by working on other things...

Aside from these two SAM projects, my first serious effort in Ren'Py - A Night at the Office - stalled for narrative, artistic and coding reasons. After last year's external hard disk failure, I was able to recover and continue this one project out of the group of at least four that I'd started. I decided to rewrite and expand the first half, to flesh out the story a little more, but struggled with getting the new threads in order. I've had a hard time sketching anything, and what I wanted to achieve in terms of character expressions turned out to be more difficult than I'd hoped. The coding part, at least, was not insurmountable, and I developed a solution to my most significant self-imposed problem after just a few days' work and research. The art is proving to be more of a struggle because the moment I pick up a pencil, I start worrying that I'm going to make a mess of it, or just feel crushed by the sheer quantity of work I've laid out for myself. I ended up commissioning one of my favourite DeviantArt artists to paint a portrait of the protagonist, in an attempt to break my deadlock, but it hasn't worked so far...

One of the weirdest things to happen this year was the discovery that some of my ancient graphic design work for the ZX Spectrum, dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, turned up on the website Games That Weren't, in a post from last October. Much like discovering this humble blog getting a mention in a rundown of top TransFormers fan sites a year or so back, this brightened my days considerably. I left a comment explaining the two screens of mine, which was added to the body of the post. Spurred on by this, I raided the cassettes at my parents' place for my old Spectrum graphics, including as much as I can find of Reckless Rufus and several ancient personal projects of mine. Sadly, the cassettes haven't aged well, and some specific images refused to load. 

While the retro gaming event put on by a local computer club had to be cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic, it was rescheduled for September 2021 and went very well. The weather had been cooler and wetter in the preceding couple of weeks, but the day of the event was clear, sunny and pleasantly warm (though it got quite sweaty inside the hall, as can be expected), so that may even have been an improvement on the originally-proposed date. I had two Sega Saturns linked up to play Daytona Circuit Edition, my Atari Jaguar CD actually behaved itself this time, so I was able to put on one of my more recent purchases (BattleMorph) rather than one of the dull pack-in games, and the programmers I've been working with brought their SAM Coupés along to showcase some of the more recent software, including the work-in-progress of our current games. All the more cool, it transpired that another member of the Club is a friend of a former colleague from about a decade ago, and we were able to reconnect when she (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to pop along to the show with his wife and family.

The world at large continued its trend toward insanity, with the US starting the year with an insurrectionist riot, and ever more brazenly showing the full extent of its anti-science, anti-women's rights, racist and downright nationalist authoritarian trends. Meanwhile, the UK gradually started to realise the true impact of Brexit even as the politicians - on both sides - performing some astoundingly nimble mental gymnastics in their refusal to acknowledge that Brexit had anything to do with it. BoJo's bumbling buffoonery began to aggravate even some of the Tories, leading to some folks wondering who'd take the poisoned chalice that is the PM's job in the event that the idiot actually found himself ousted.

Meanwhile, a home-grown group of protestors, calling themselves 'Insulate Britain' took to blocking motorways... in the mistaken belief that it would somehow highlight their cause: making the UK Government ensure that all new build properties have adequate insulation installed, and that existing housing has access to some form of insulation, in an attempt to bring down fuel bills as Brexit causes them the skyrocket. It's also supposed to help with the environment, but it feels like the people behind the protests have a distorted view of how big the UK actually is... Weirdly, after a burst of sustained activity, Insulate Britain went strangely quiet toward the end of the year.

As vaccinations against COVID-19 became increasingly accessible, so too did ridiculous anti-vax propaganda, propelled by social media and more mental gymnastics in political fields. Probably my favourite bad-faith argument against the vaccines and/or vaccine mandates - suggested by a politician from a US state that already mandates MMR and Polio vaccines, amongst others - was that the COVID vaccine was new... But then, so were all vaccines at one point. Hell, the smallpox vaccine was derived from cowpox, and you'd think eyebrows were raised at the mere thought of that, yet that's now one of the mandated vaccinations across the US. It absolutely baffles and infuriates me that so many people today will happily believe any old rubbish they read on social media, accept any insane 'treatment' recommended by TV personalities or 'influencers', and refuse genuine medical treatments, and yet later head to their GP or to hospitals once they get ill as a result of their own stupidity and stubbornness. They'd be doing the world a favour by living - or dying - with their ignorant decisions. Perhaps the Omicron variant - identified in November - will identify this year's nominees for the Darwin Awards.

In terms of TransFormers, this has been one of the dullest, most frustrating years I can remember, as Hasbro's output succeeded only in dissuading me from future purchases. Quality - both in terms of engineering and materials - has taken a nosedive, while prices continue to rise. Size classes have all but lost their meaning due to inconsistency at the Deluxe pricepoint, while Voyagers are being packaged with perfunctory, poor quality accessories at the Leader pricepoint. It's very telling, also, that Commander class Rodimus Prime, a figure I was somewhat ambivalent about, didn't become significantly more attractive a purchase when Smyths Toys dropped its price by £24 at the end of November. Just ahead of Christmas, both Smyths and Amazon had cut the toy's price by just over a third, suggesting that Hasbro had grossly overestimated the toy's value from the start. Similarly, Smyths dropped Beast Megatron's price by £10, which I found a little frustrating considering the strife I had obtaining it back when it was first released.

Then you have the absolute junk that's actually aimed at children, such as the disastrously gimmicky Roll & Change 'toys' in the Cyberverse line, with their flimsy, cavernous plastic, their hair-triggered, spring-loaded automatic transformation and their dull, unimaginative sound-and-light features. I really miss the days when TransFormers was a single, focussed toyline aimed at a wider demographic, as opposed to a range of toylines, all of which patronise their intended demographics.

A good chunk of the much-vaunted Pulse exclusives have been unimaginative, underwhelming rehashes of ideas first put forth by the former Collectors' Club and BotCon, while their streamed events have carried an air of uncertainty and desperation. It would be easy to say that Hasbro have lost direction following the sad passing of Brian Goldner in October but, to be honest, they've lacked any real direction since the brand's 30th Anniversary.

The first time I gave up on collecting TransFormers, back in the late 1980s/early 90s, it was because my life had moved on and my interests lay elsewhere - as much because those other interests were actively enticing me away as it was that the brand had lost its lustre, which it very definitely had. To a degree, I'm feeling like that again, but this time it's far more because of what the TransFormers brand has been reduced to since its grand renaissance in 2004. While the Third Party products may well be enticing me away from official Hasbro merchandise, it's not as widely available and tends to be vastly more expensive. And it's ironic that, back in the 90s, it took the enormous risk of producing Beast Wars to revitalise the brand, yet now that continuity has simply been squandered and consumed by yet another G1 reboot precisely because Hasbro - like Disney, and many other such corporations - is no longer willing to take such grand risks.

In a similar vein, at the end of November, a rumour surfaced (and was later confirmed) that IDW Comics were losing their license to produce TransFormers comics. On the surface, that seemed baffling considering the popularity of their output over the years and the amazing new worlds they've woven and characters they've created within what is one of Hasbro's most recognisable brands. However, it was quickly pointed out that, while their early output was fantastic, a reboot a few years back - tied to the Prime Wars Trilogy toyline - turned them into a far more obvious marketing tool with weaker stories more closely tied into whatever was on the shelves at the time, rather than the expansive space operas of old. Plus, popular as the comics may be, printed material generally seems to be going out of style with the sheer volume of streaming content available these days. The cynical among us might well worry that we are fast approaching the point of being square-eyed zombies, spoon-fed only approved media, rather than having the option - not to say the ability - to read material of our own choosing. Meanwhile the cost of producing printed media has been increasing over the years due to generally upward 'fluctuations' in paper pulp costs. Additionally, there are only so many ways to tell stories about giant alien robots that transform into vehicles, etc... And it could simply be that both Hasbro and IDW feel those have been pretty much exhausted after sixteen years of holding the license, and a fresh approach will be sought.

However, let's not forget that this is the same Hasbro who de-licensed the TransFormers Collectors' Club and BotCon five years ago, and then singularly failed to present a worthwhile alternative (and, no, Hasbro Pulse, Pulse Premium, HasCon/PulseCon and their 'capsule programmes' really don't count - not least because their first is a shitty, low-budget re-tread of something BotCon did thirteen years ago). Granted, any plans they may have had for 2020 or 2021 were reduced, by necessity, to streamed online 'events', but even those felt rushed poorly executed, with way too much cringy forced enthusiasm and some blatantly obvious cherry-picking of the few positive comments from the overwhelmingly angry and disappointed chat.

But, on the subject of related media, news emerged in early November that the next TransFormers live action movie - Rise of the Beasts - had been delayed a full year, now hitting screens in June 2023. The more I heard about the movie, the more set photos and videos turned up, the more I started thinking the movie will likely be even more deliriously bad than Michael Bay's efforts. Bad enough that they're mixing characters from G1 and Beast Wars (because that worked so well with War for Cybertron: Kingdom, after all), the idea that the Maximals are living underground, in a base accessed via a manhole in the street made me think more of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than TransFormers. I'm open to being wrong, but it almost feels as though Paramount are now actively trying to scupper the entire property.

While the Studio Series line continues to produce mostly adequate toys - the unveiled set of Cybertronian forms for Wheeljack, Ratchet, Brawn, Soundwave and Ravage (I can't allow myself to call a Core class Shockwave 'adequate', even if it does look halfway decent) certainly constitutes that, while the Deluxe class Arcee revealed in early December looks amazing. In fact, it's baffling that such a thing can exist, coming from the same company that produced the ugly, lazy War for Cybertron: Earthrise Arcee (that backpeddled even the simple, wasteful engineering of the 2015 Generations/TF Legends toy) or the upcoming TF Legacy monstrosity. Clearly, I won't be entirely giving up on collecting TransFormers toys, but it certainly feels as though I'm tailing off in a very definite way.

Of course, it cannot go without mention that 2021 saw the deaths of Brian Goldner, Hasbro's CEO, in October and in early December, Henry Orenstein, the man who can be credited with creating the TransFormers toyline (though not the brand name) after seeing the potential of Takara's Micro Change and Diaclone toylines. I'd imagine neither had any day-to-day involvement in TransFormers these days, but both are nevertheless sad losses. Outside of Hasbro, but nevertheless TransFormers-related, news emerged on Boxing Day that Derrick J. Wyatt - Art Director of the TransFormers: Animated TV show - had "unexpectedly passed away earlier this month". Details have not yet been forthcoming. Wyatt's style was bold and energetic (everything the toyline has been lacking!) and, while I wasn't immediately sold on the concept, I absolutely loved the show once I started watching, and maintain a small collection of the toys. He will be missed by many fandoms.

Highlights of 2021

1. Finally getting out and about again - it took till the second half of the year, but my girlfriend and I made several trips uptown to the cinema, theatre, a museum and to a live recording of a podcast. We saw some live improv, featuring a comedian we'd first encountered by chance while on holiday in Brighton... and promptly came down with colds because of the lack of social distancing and mask-wearing throughout the venue. On the upside, all these trips gave us the opportunity to revisit favourite restaurants, including the one Courtney and I went to when we first met, nine years ago. Specific trips included:
• Anything Goes - I'm a big fan of musicals, and I think Anything Goes has been referenced in a lot of other things Courtney and I have enjoyed, so we spent some of our Christmas 2019 theatre tokens on this. Annoyingly, I got food poisoning, and had to rush out maybe 5-10 minutes before the end... but I was able to guess what happened.
• No Such Thing As A Fish - while this may not sound like much of a recommendation, Courtney and I regularly fall asleep to this fun podcast, in which four QI researchers regale each other (and the audience) with their favourite facts gleaned from that week's research. The live event included a Geek-Off at the start, in which each of the team flashed their geek credentials for the enjoyment of the audience.
• The Crow - I've been a fan of this film since I first saw it in the cinemas upon its release, but Courtney had never seen it. When she discovered it was being shown in a posh London hotel's private cinema, she booked us tickets using a Virgin Experience voucher we'd received for Christmas. Overall, the experience could have been better - the advertised 'tailored cocktails' didn't happen (probably due to very low attendance), and a group of late arrivals were talking the whole way though... which wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that the sound system in the theatre was awful. Still, we'd had a nice lunch beforehand.
• Transport Museum Lates - wasn't sure what to expect from this one, not least because I don't think I've ever been to the Transport Museum, and the visit we booked ended up being on the Friday at the end of a fortnight during which I'd been quite ill. The main part of the evening was a font-related quiz, which should have been right up my alley, though Courtney ended up doing better than me, winning a book. This was partly because some of the specific questions were more general knowledge, while others were broken up into obscure visual clues. Also didn't help that, as with The Crow, a group of late arrivals (joining at round 3 of the quiz) were parked right behind us... and were talking loudly throughout the rest of the quiz. Afterward, we had a quick buzz around the rest of the museum, but missed enough that it would be worth returning in future.
• The Book of Mormon - while I'd heard a little about this show, I wasn't sure its subject matter would be of all that much interest to me, as an agnostic, and the fact that Mormonism is the frequent butt of South Park jokes didn't help. That said, my girlfriend is atheist, and she's been keen to see it for ages, so what do I know? As with most musicals, I really enjoyed it and, while it's naturally a little 'heightened', I found it to be a fairly honest dissection of religion, generally, not just the Mormons... but, as Courtney - who learned about the religion in school - pointed out, to the outsider, it's particularly strange that anyone has ever been convinced to believe that particular one.
• 2:22 A Ghost Story - bit of an odd choice for us, since it's a ghost story (which isn't something Courtney would normally go for), but we saw ads on Facebook promoting Stephanie Beatriz joining the cast, and Courtney is a fan of Brooklyn 99. Little did I know, when we booked, that it was written by Danny Robins, the creator of the excellent BBC podcast The Battersea Poltergeist, which I'd only listened to a couple of weeks before we saw the show. I think it would have worked just as well without the egregious jumpscares at the end of evert act, but I really enjoyed it... Well-written, brilliantly performed (James Buckley was surprising) and with some nice twists.
• The Christmas Steam Express - where we live, Courtney and I occasionally see a steam train running along one of the London Underground routes, and I've said for years that I'd like to take a trip one of these days. For one reason or another, we've never been able to organise tickets for that particular journey but, as an early Christmas present, Courtney booked us onto the Christmas Steam Express, running from Victoria station. Since it was the evening run, we didn't see much scenery (except where things were lit up by Christmas lights) and much of it ran through residential areas. I was a little disappointed that it didn't run any faster, but it was an enjoyable enough trip, and I'd definitely like to do another at some point... Preferably during the day...
2. RetCon 2021 - as well as being a super-fun day featuring retro computing celebrities, I was able to reconnect and catch up with a former colleague, who's been a friend of another member since childhood (unbeknownst to either of us till he invited her to the show, and she told him it sounded like something I'd have been interested in). My Jaguar CD was more cooperative this time, so I was able to show BattleMorph, and my twin-Saturn setup, playing Daytona Circuit Edition head-to-head via the Taisen Cable (and both with Arcade Racer steering wheels) seemed to go down well. It was kind of overwhelming to be around that many people, all day, for the first time in about eighteen months, but I got through it, and really enjoyed it. I was interviewed for a documentary being put together by one of the guests, but I suspect my input won't make the cut, as I got anxious and tongue-tied once the camera started rolling.
3. Commissioning a bit of art - readers of this blog may or may not be aware of my presence of DeviantArt (the cartoons from the banner are there, amongst other things), but I've been looking into commissioning art related to a particular project of mine. When one of the artists I follow (and one of my favourites, at that) announced in September that she was accepting commissions for hand-painted postcards, I leapt at the opportunity. The results exceeded my expectations, and can be found here.
4. Studio Series Cybertronian forms revealed - while the reveal of Wheeljack - via a YouTuber who acquires a lot of early samples by dubious channels - was not the kind I like to support, I have to admit the toy looks great. This was swiftly followed by a more official unveiling of a Voyager class Soundwave (crap 'vehicle mode', but no worse than the vastly more expensive Third Party version), Deluxe class Ratchet and Brawn, and the addition of Core class to the line, starting with Ravage and - bafflingly - Shockwave. Arcee appeared later, via a streamed 'roundtable' event and, to me, she looks like the best of the bunch. Shame we have to wait well into 2022 before they're available to buy...
5. Realising that Fossilisers are pretty cool, actually - not that I've bought any, and nor do I intend to, I'm just going by the photos and stop-motion videos of the myriad gestalts built using Fossiliser parts. Had they been their own, unrelated toyline, I'd have thought them very imaginative and weirdly fun... But, as part of a TransFormers franchise, they're utter nonsense.
6. Travel routes opening up again as COVID vaccine take-up improves - while I'm unlikely to be doing much travelling, and feel caution is still very much required, the fact that transatlantic flights resumed in November felt like a hugely positive step in getting out of the 'panic stations' phase of the pandemic.
7. Courtney doing well in her degree - despite some huge challenges, and huge downturns in her mental health during the year, she achieved an enviable grade in her final assignment, keeping her on course for a Distinction. Now comes her thesis... As an aside, she also recorded a talk she's done several times at the Science Museum, turning it into a podcast.
8. Halloween Gaming - in previous years, I've tried to get my notoriously squeamish girlfriend to watch horror movies for Halloween. She doesn't enjoy the genre for the most part so, this year, I played it a bit different, and suggested an evening of horror gaming. We started with the original Resident Evil and Deep Fear, both played on the Sega Saturn, both until death, then moved onto one of my favourite games of all time, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, on the Wii. We returned to the latter the following weekend, and I ended up completing the game again (same ending, unfortunately). It was great fun, and made me think I should probably try to get a bit further on the two Saturn games at some point.
9. D&D with the niece - Kate had asked for a D&D Starter Kit book for Christmas 2020 but, rather than setting herself up as Dungeon Master, as we had expected, she decided to start as one of the players, requiring my sister to bone up on how it all worked so she could take on the DM role. Starting in February, we played for a couple of hours each weekend (timings changing throughout the year to accommodate Kate's attention span and, at times, seemingly waning interest), and completed our first campaign in December. It was a lot of fun, overall, though individual sessions could be quite stressful because of Kate's insistence on attacking everything in sight - both animate and inanimate, including her own team and allies - or having her character fall asleep on the floor when she lost interest in the story (pretty much whenever it wasn't focussed on her). Courtney had to bow out due to the needs of her degree studies but, now it's been suggested that Kate wants to ascend to DM-ing, we may be getting the full band back together in the New Year... albeit possibly playing with new characters.
10. Re-watching The X-Files - one of the best TV shows back in the 1990s, with a couple of disappointing movie spin-offs and some recent reboot 'event mini-series', The X-Files actually stands up remarkably well, even today. Some of the CGI effects are a bit ropey when viewed on a reasonably high-def LCD screen, but the stories still work, and some of the government conspiracy stuff is perhaps more believable today than it was back when the show originally aired. What's more, since the BBC lost the show to Sky, there are several seasons of the show that I never saw, so going through the boxed set of the entire series has been a real treat.
11. Lost In Space Season 3 - returning to Netflix at the start of December, this new take on Irwin Allen's seminal sci-fi show has been a true joy to watch. We've gone almost two full years without it and it struck me, quite early on in the very first episode, how strange it was to be watching well-written science fiction again. Hell, scratch that: to be watching well-written television full stop. A believable and endearing family dynamic where, even when they argue, their love for each other and their strength as a family shines through. A fantastical situation in which the protagonists succeed through skill, intelligence and determination, not through some convenient deus ex machina. The special effects are used comparatively sparingly, and are generally not the focus of the show, but are consistently better than many other shows.
12. Doctor Who: Flux - surprisingly, Chris Chibnall's swan song as the showrunner turned out to be by far the most entertaining season of his run (three specials to go, so there's still time for better). It wasn't perfect, and featured quite a lot of plot holes and unnecessary, silly humour, but it least it didn't have the in-your-face, rammed-down-your-throat moralising and preachiness that had become the bête noire of Jodie Whittaker's tenure in the TARDIS. It struck me, in the penultimate episode, that Flux might also have been Chibnall's big "fuck you" to the 'fandom' (or possibly the BBC?), in that it presented the Doctor with the opportunity to start afresh in a whole new universe of possibilities, or to return to and save the 'old universe'... And who is it that's taking over from him next year? Oh yes, Russell T. Davis, creator of the 'old universe' (or the new one, at least). Maybe I'm wrong... but, if not, it's a little on-the-nose... which would seem rather more par for the course on Chibnall's run.

Disappointments of 2021:

1. Third Parties backing away from TransFormers - no surprise, given the much-publicised crackdown on WeiJiang which led to re-engineering genius Black Apple being imprisoned, or the ridiculous 'fan community' response to Big Firebird's Nicee. On the other hand, it has led me to something of an epiphany: that I'm potentially more interested in the concept of shape-shifting robots than I am specifically in the official TransFormers brand. If these Third Parties continue to produce their own lines, I may choose to invest more in those in the future.
2. Hasbro PulseCon 2021 & 1027 Premium Event - The sad thing about these events (aside from how cringy they are) is that the TransFormers reveals were so dull. When it was mentioned in the 1027 stream that 2021 was the 35th Anniversary year for the animated movie, my reaction was "you could have fooled me", given how little emphasis I'd seen on that throughout the year. Worse still, the Generations Selects exclusive for 2022 is yet another rip-off of a FunPub/BotCon exclusive from 2015, itself a homage to a Diaclone toy. Frankly, I was a lot more excited by toys from other lines, despite having absolutely no interest in buying them. For example, the HasLab GI Joe Skystriker, while horrendously overpriced, looks fantastic... and I fully expect an eventual Starscream repaint. Similarly, the replica Ghostbusters proton pack is insanely expensive ($400/£360) but, in theory, could be an excellent product... except that it appears to come without a neutrino wand. Even getting Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, to geek out over it (not to mention seeing genuine enthusiasm from John Warden) doesn't change the fact that it's ridiculous to package the proton pack without even a basic neutrino wand. Meanwhile, on the TransFormers side of PulseCon, not only was there too great a focus on digital/gaming crossovers (and mentions of upcoming NFTs, because everyone's getting into that crap these days), but there were very few genuine surprises, and what few there were turned out to be a bit on the crap side. Which brings us to...
3. TransFormers Legacy - which is, essentially, just a new angle on G1, turning much-loved characters from alternate continuities into ugly, disproportionate junk rather than celebrating their original aesthetics, but giving them more contemporary engineering. A far more interesting take on Legacy would be taking G1 characters and giving them a new spin using an entirely new aesthetic, drawing on the best aspects of every continuity... But clearly Hasbro think otherwise.
4. TransFormers Generations Shattered Glass Collection - done right, Hasbro's inaugural 'capsule programme', their own take on the 2008 BotCon theme, could have been interesting... Unfortunately, it was not done right. They took the distinctly low-effort approach of simply repainting toys from current lines - Siege and Studio Series '86 - with minimal retooling and a handful of new accessories, in a vain attempt to mimic (or possibly supersede) the BotCon set. It was an abject failure, in my opinion, and set the bar very low for any subsequent 'capsule programmes' they might produce.
5. The Interminable Swarm of Bumblebees - not content with releasing about a dozen Bumblebee toys for every other character released in the Studio Series line (OK, not quite but, as I write, Deluxe class Bumblebee figures account for around 15% of the line), Hasbro created the so-called 'Buzzworthy Bumblebee' line to really drive home their obsession with the character (and give them additional opportunities to re-release SS Bumblebees in 2-packs with movie-appropriate Decepticons), in the assumption that the fans could be compelled into synergising with this bizarre zealotry. To help this along, they started releasing multi-packs, generally featuring at least one perceived 'must have' other character alongside a unique Bumblebee, generally resulting in a flood of unwanted figures on the secondary market, many of which being Bumblebees. Worse still, the QC on these multipacks was shockingly bad. And while they keep releasing masked and unmasked variants of the same movie Bumblebee figures, but have yet to release a single G1 toy-accurate head sculpt for the non-movie lines...
6. Still not getting to the cinema very often - in fact, we've only been to the cinema two or three times, and one of those was the 'private' cinema in a hotel. The most significant reason, frankly, is that there just haven't been that many movies I want to watch. It's quite a change versus only a couple of years ago, when I'd regularly meet a friend for lunch and a movie over a weekend and, while there were certainly a few disappointing movies among them, the whole cinema experience is something I'd appreciated since my youth... Now, it just doesn't seem worthwhile, when there are so many streaming platforms available, and one can wait just a few months to pick up a movie on DVD for much the same cost as the cinema ticket plus travel.
7. DC/'Arrowverse' shows' declining quality - I have to admit that I've always found Arrow to be lodged a bit too far up its own arse, such that its attempts at lightening the tone and injecting a bit of humour rarely landed for me. The Flash was initially a huge improvement, but relied far too much on the 'keeping secrets backfires' cliché that so often appears in Superhero stories, and had some rather predictable series-long arcs. Supergirl started out OK, but quickly devolved into saccharine preachiness, forced 'representation' and overt political messaging. While I broadly agree with its 'message' of tolerance and inclusivity, it feels like I'm being bludgeoned with it. The less said about Batwoman, the better, but clearly the showrunners on that have no idea what they're doing. The only real highlights have been Legends of Tomorrow, for its brazen campiness, and a couple of the newer shows - Stargirl and Swamp Thing. The former because it's rather more believable for a bunch of teenagers to be so argumentative, secretive and impulsive, the latter because its excellent cast has worked wonders with a somewhat murky, silly story. It was also cancelled after just one season, which I have admittedly still not watched all the way through.
8. Learning that my father voted in favour of Brexit - and, what's more, he did so based on a single complaint: that the unelected European Parliament had too much influence over the UK. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't based on such a fundamental exaggeration of Brussels' influence on us, given the number of special dispensations we had under our former agreement with the EU.
9. No call for a general election - given the absolute shambles of Brexit, it should be unthinkable that we're just going to continue blundering on under BoJo and his corrupt cronies... but, frankly, none of the opposition parties have a remotely worthwhile candidate or any particulalr compelling policies anymore, and he knows it. It's a truly sad state of affairs, and I wish they'd focus on policy rather than the idiotic culture war surrounding Brexit. But, hey, at least our politicians aren't arguing (so much) about matters of public health.
10. Trump just won't go away - not content with spreading a demonstrably false narrative about election rigging (after the 2016 election was most likely hacked and rigged in his favour), and inciting a riot at the start of the year, the guy continued to fund-raise, ostensibly for more 'challenges' to the results and 'ballot audits' (all of which came out suggesting Biden won by a slightly greater margin), but actually just to line his own otherwise empty pockets. The media insist on giving this failure of a man, this several-times-bankrupt 'billionaire' ever more airtime, which is all he really wants. Well, TV appearances and money. The fact that he deserted and disowned all the "great patriots" who marched on the Capitol in his name is all anyone needs to know about Trump.
11. Self-set reading challenge failure - at the end of 2020, I finally read Terry Pratchett's final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, and the experience left me more saddened than I'd expected, as the book was an unfinished mess that really should not have been published (Pratchett had insisted that the hard disk containing all his unfinished work should be destroyed by a steamroller after his death from Alzheimers, TSC evidently slipped through the cracks before that happened). By way of a remedy, I set myself the challenge of re-reading the entire Discworld series in 2021, but gave up less than a quarter of the way through. At the time, I felt I just wanted a break after taking longer than expected to read only the first eight books back-to-back, and being surprisingly disappointed by half of those, but the break never ended. I'll almost certainly get back to it, but I'm not as enthusiastic about it as I was when I first started and, at my reading speed, it'll likely take at least a couple of years to get through all of them.
12. Learning that the Soseki Museum has closed/relocated - I've been meaning, for years, to get down to south London to visit the Soseki Museum. I tried once before, not long after I learned of its existence, but wasn't able to locate it as it wasn't adequately signposted - it was in a residential street, with no labelling at street level beyond the number of the house it was based in, which I'd failed to make proper note of, on the assumption that it would have a sign of some kind - and I ended up coming home with a splitting headache. I learned just a few days ago that it closed in 2016, but reopened in 2019 in a new location, in Sussex, accessible by appointment only for just a few months of the year. What's most disappointing about this is that it closed partly due to dwindling visitor numbers... which is not surprising considering how hard it was to find...

Previous Predictions vs. Reality

1. A third lockdown - This hardly required any supernatural skill to predict, it was obvious that it would happen thanks to the stupid way some people behaved toward the ideas of masks, social distancing, etc. What I couldn't have predicted was the wave of backlash against vaccines thanks to online misinformation, ignorance and abject stupidity. I'd thought better of the UK, but it seems I was wrong to do so. Chances are, with the advent of a new variant at the end of the year, we'll be heading back into lockdown again soon.
2. UK Government shakeup? - While it didn't happen as quickly as I'd expected (early September?!) and didn't involve the arrogant, ignorant waste of space we call a Prime Minister leaving office, there was a shake-up... Substituting one set of upper class twits with no appropriate skills or experience for another. No cronyism here. They even wanted to change the rules about lobbyists to protect one very clearly corrupt MP, who nevertheless chose to resign.
3. Getting a new job - This just didn't happen. I did get an email from one of my previous Temping placements asking me to do some website updates ahead of an event in February, and they contacted me again in November about tackling the same again in the New Year. I also received a couple of leads from former colleagues throughout the year, but the locations weren't very accessible and there tended to be aspects of the job description that weren't a great fit for me. The closest I came was a second interview with a book publisher in town, which involved producing a report on some trial tasks and discussion about how I performed. It seemed to go quite well, though they were evidently put off when I admitted to taking a deep dive into one of the tasks (trying to figure out why it wouldn't work), but the post-interview feedback I got via the agency was absolute nonsense. In particular, the suggestion that I should have formatted my report exactly how I had formatted it. I've since learned from several different sources that book publishers tend to be "quite snooty" about people from magazine publishing backgrounds... which perhaps I should have guessed when one of the interview panel mentioned in the first interview that he had come from a magazines background himself, but then back-peddled frantically in the second interview.
4. Getting out and about again - While this has been substantially less than I'd hoped, as mentioned above, Courtney and I were finally able to make use of the theatre tokens we got for Christmas 2019. We also went to the cinema to see a film or two, visited my parents and, of course, I got to...
5. Presenting at least one complete game for the SAM Coupé at a small retro gaming event - This didn't pan out for many reasons and I didn't even take my own SAM, but the programmer on one of the games was hoping, at that time, to finish around Christmas this year, if not earlier. All the equipment I took along worked great, though.
6. Completing my first Ren'Py game - Still hasn't happened... I'm struggling with the art side due to a loss of confidence in my drawing skills, and with the writing side because I'm trying to work in the middle of an existing story without causing too great an impact on what's already either side of it. On the coding side, I'm not doing too badly, having solved one particular problem after a bit of research and experimentation.
7. Courtney on a quiz show? - Sadly, it was not to be. Courtney's team was selected as a backup team for Only Connect, and might have been called upon had one of the chosen teams been unable to make the recording, but then everyone else in the team pulled out, supposedly in fear of Twitter trolls. It would have been cool, though it's not as if we - or anyone we know - watch the show religiously. Courtney considered applying as a solo contestant, but decided against due to the requirements of her degree. However, the production company contacted everyone later in the year, asking if they were planning to reapply because their audition had been so much fun. For them.
8. The next TransFormers line will preview (or be 'leaked') during the summer - Pretty much the only thing leaked before October's PulseCon was the name 'Legacy' and some vague lists of possible items in the line. I won't be at all surprised if certain YouTubers start showing toys in early-to-mid 2022, though. Probably of greater interest were the listings of upcoming Studio Series toys which appeared in September, and the post-PulseCon product reveals in early November and December. Seems like Hasbro are giving us toys of more Cybertronian forms, like Cliffjumper, for the handful of 'bots who appeared in the all too brief Cybertron battle sequence from the start of Bumblebee's solo movie. They all look great, so I'm keen! It does seem strange that Hasbro are being consistently scooped by one particular malapropism-prone YouTuber, but they don't seem overly concerned by it.

Predictions for 2022

Under the circumstances, it's difficult to know where to start. The world is still in disarray thanks to COVID-19, the UK is an absolute shambles thanks to BoJo's amateurish, ill-conceived Brexit 'plan', any my field of employment for 25-odd years is unlikely to be fruitful anymore. However, some things are perhaps a little easier to predict...

1. TransFormers Legacy will continue to disappoint - I'm not saying I won't be buying any Legacy toys... just that I expect to be buy very few of them. I mean, for perspective, Studio Series has, by and large, been a good toyline... but I've bought just one third of the line's output to date. War for Cybertron was pretty much diminishing returns until the last chapter, but the vast majority of Kingdom toys I bought were the Beast Wars remakes, and even some of those were quite disappointing. In the long run, I suspect Legacy will either get a major aesthetic overhaul further down the line, or will be cancelled and replaced by something a bit more imaginative.
2. Studio Series will start to cut more corners - Something that I've noticed with some of the more recent SS releases is that, aside from them being smaller than toys from previous movie lines, there's been a return to folding up vast amounts of vehicle shell into an ugly backpack (which had been somewhat less prevalent when the line first emerged), a noticeable drop in the paint budget, and a dramatic reduction in plastic quality. If a figure gets a repaint as a new character, that might get a bit more paintwork, but the first iteration is always pretty dull... Which is a shame when you get molds like Jolt, which are unlikely to get a repaint (unless, of course, they pull a 'Shadow Raider' on the mold, and create a tertiary character out of what was effectively a background character). The evidence against this suggestion is the set of Cybertronian forms from the Bumblebee movie (with the exception of Soundwave, which is pretty much the prime example of corners being cut), so perhaps I'll be proven wrong on this one.
3. Rise of the Beasts will need reshoots - Given that Hasbro must surely have already had the RotB toyline in progress, set to go into production for release ahead of the movie's original planned release date in June 2022, I can't imagine they're happy about the delayed release of the movie... But the concept is so batshit insane, I'm expecting cast-members to come back for reshoots once the film starts coming together in the editing room and as SFX work progresses. Some of this, no doubt, will be the result of screening the semi-complete movie to test audiences, who will probably neither enjoy nor understand it. In all honesty, based on what I've heard of the movie, I wouldn't even be surprised if it got cancelled, even at this late stage.
4. Further Brexit/COVID disasters - All things considered, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there couldn't possibly be that much more that could go wrong... But our stunningly ignorant and smugly self-important government seem to enjoy finding new ways to fuck things up. They've already given permission for water companies to pollute our rivers and seas due to shortages of the treatment chemicals (as a consequence of Brexit), and the results of that are already being seen on our beaches and in fish caught in our sovereign waters. The fact that the UK and Europe have also shown themselves to be full of the same ignorant, moronic anti-vax rhetoric doesn't bode well and, as I write, there are those who are now expecting COVID shots to become as regular a part of our lives as 'flu shots as a result of this.
5. Venturing outside of London - this is essentially contingent on #4, in that the Government might, at any moment, decide to restrict travel all over again. Even under the most favourable circumstances, we're not going to be able to take a proper holiday unless I can get back into paid employment, but we are intending to visit Courtney's family in January.
6. Completing some games, starting some new ones - one of the SAM Coupé games is very nearly complete, and so should get rolled out early in the year... If it doesn't, it'll probably only be because I've been so fussy about the graphics. One of my Ren'Py games should make some more positive progress as well, which will mean I can start fleshing out the story of the follow-up(s)...

The bottom line is that 2021 has not been a good year. Neither for me, specifically, nor for a lot of other people, and for myriad reasons. That said, looking back over the last twelve months, there are a lot of good memories. It honestly doesn't bear thinking about where I might be if I was still living alone, as having Courtney around certainly made the lockdowns more bearable for me, even if they sometimes had a detrimental effect on her mental health.

Nevertheless, at several points during the year, it has been incredibly difficult to muster up enough interest to write about anything TransFormers related because I'm so fatigued by Hasbro presenting the same G1 shit over and over again. I did a lot better in the early half of the year, but the absence of posts in August (and December!) really shows that the apathy and ennui had set in. Aside from a handful of figures closing off the final chapter of the War for Cybertron Trilogy and some of the newly-announced Studio Series figures, I don't see that changing next year... at least until I'm in gainful employment again, and can pursue some more Third Party figures. In all honesty, and for the most part, nothing I've seen from Hasbro this year does anything to allay the fears that I have expressed before on this blog: that Hasbro are repeating exactly the same mistakes, due to exactly the same lack of direction for the brand, as those that effectively killed the TransFormers brand before its desperate reboot into Beast Wars, by their sub-brand Kenner, back in 1996. Sadly, Hasbro today are so risk-averse, they're riding - and relying - on reboot after reboot of G1 rather than trying to find something genuinely new to do with the concept.

Looking back over the year, it feels as though I haven't made as much progress on anything as I'd have liked. My continued unemployment is weighing on my mind, as is the feeling that I just don't want to go back into the field I've worked in for around 25 years. It's not that I don't think I'd enjoy it anymore (though I've worked in enough crummy Publishing offices to leave me with some doubts on that score), just that it no longer feels like a viable, long-term (or even mid-term) career due to the redundancies and workflow automation I've seen over the last five years. I feel that I could have made far more progress on the SAM games I've been working on, and my Ren'Py projects have been a real struggle in the wake of last year's hard disk crash, but also because I've lost a lot of confidence in my drawing skills... More practice may be called for in 2022 and beyond!