2025 Retrospective

Well... What a year.

Toward the end of 2024, I was contacted by both of my regular/annual freelancing clients, with the expected jobs: updates to a website for one, updates to a printed booklet for the other. Both would normally gear up during January, but it's good to be forewarned, and get the question of payment out of the way in advance... At least, as far as possible, where one of them is concerned...

However, a new wrinkle appeared, in that an agency I signed up with a couple of years back also contacted me... during the time I was out of town visiting Courtney's family over Christmas. They contacted me again in the New Year, because they had a job they thought would be ideal for me. I wasn't 100% sold on the job description - it seemed like they wanted someone to wear far too many hats, so to speak, handling advertising both print and digital across a multitude of titles. The story was that they were only looking for someone to cover a role during a period of recruitment, but the agency felt I might as well interview for the job while I was there, since I had the appropriate skills and background. I agreed, figuring that, at worst, I'd get a few weeks' work out of it.

So, an interview was set up for Thursday 9th January. It seemed to go well, and I was told I'd hear something - at the very least an invitation to a second interview - by the end of the following week. The agency called me again a couple of days after the interview and informed me that the company were only speaking to three candidates (wasn't clear whether or not that included me), so they were intending to call them to follow-up on my interview.

By Wednesday 15th, I had a verbal job offer. By Friday 17th, I'd signed and returned a contract... and I started on Monday 20th. Possibly the fastest turnaround from interview to starting work I've ever experienced. Getting to and from work on the three days I'm in the office is an almost trivial 45 minute journey on a good day, working from home the other two days has been improved immeasurably since I upgraded my internet connection to full-fibre a month or so into the job, and the work is great fun, too... 

The company is far from perfect - the typical focus on the Sales team as the most important department is very much in evidence - but, for all their faults, they're still a damn sight better than some of the other places I've worked. The main problem for me so far has been the slack periods... but, even there, if no-one needs an extra pair of hands, I assign myself projects to see if improvements can be made to workflow, or start researching new features in the software that I'm otherwise not familiar with.

That my return to gainful employment has coincided with a significant downward trend in the quality of Hasbro's output has been disappointing, to say the least. Engineering intricacy occasionally exceeds the limits of the materials they're using, the direction of the toyline is interminably G1, with an emphasis on the ugly, inconsistent cartoon, the prices exceed what I'm willing to pay in the case of the majority of toys, and I've now experienced too many breakages to want to spend that kind of money even on something that appears to be worthwhile. 

On the upside, the job allowed Courtney and I to take our first proper holidays together since we went to Chicago, about ten years ago. It also allowed me to buy a new (albeit reconditioned) laptop, so I can keep working on personal projects when I'm staying away from home... Which, now I think about it, seems to be a vague attempt to appease my workaholic tendencies without actually continuing my paid work while on annual leave...

Highlights of 2025:

• Getting back into full-time work - as detailed above, I kicked off the New Year with a flurry of activity. Not only was I once again working on website updates for the Crafts Council ahead of Collect 2025, but I had updated to CDMT's annual UK Guide booklet (which ended up getting largely delayed till March) and, on top of that, had a job interview in early January that led to a job offer barely a week later.
• Courtney getting her Masters - Courtney's academic path has been anything but straightforward and, in all honesty, there have been times where it's been stressful to me to watch how stressed she's been. In particular, the last couple of years have been horrific - more to do with her job, but that had a knock-on effect on her studies. Nevertheless, she set herself a plan of action for her thesis and did a good job of sticking to it, delivering the finished text a whole day early. Her results came in early December, and she handed in her notice the following week.
• Taking a trip to Eastbourne - for my 51st Birthday, Courtney and I took the week off work and spent a few days on the south coast. We didn't make any plans beyond swimming in the sea and taking a walk across the cliffs to Beachy Head. The weather was nigh-on perfect, and I even swam in the ocean (chilly as it was) for the first time in at least 40 years.
• Taking a trip to Iceland - to celebrate Courtney handing in her MSc thesis in September, we decided to get out of the country for a few days, and fancied something a bit different. The weather was, once again, excellent (better than London, certainly) and the pre-booked excursions included relaxing in a geothermal spa, exploring the 'Golden Circle' and (sort of) seeing the Northern Lights with my own eyes.
• Getting out and about a bit more - coinciding somewhat with my 51st Birthday, Courtney and I went to a London-based sake brewery for a 'tour'/tasting session, then my best mate invited me along to an open day/summer fair at a farm near where we grew up.
• MCM London Comic Con (May) - this was the first time I've attended an MCM event since before the Pandemic, and offered even more evidence of the benefits I'm getting from being on antidepressants. I got chatting with several of the exhibitors (mainly the artists, including the amazing Olivia Rose - a fellow Giger fan - and the London-based Lewis Campbell) and, for once, didn't feel the need to escape by lunchtime. The event was certainly no better organised than usual, but I felt more engaged and happy to be there, despite the crowding.
• Starfury Events' Warp 1 - as a lifelong fan of Star Trek, it may surprise people to learn that I'd never been to a Star Trek convention before this year... and, to be honest, the only reason I went to this was because Courtney was going, and had decided to go in Cosplay (for the first day, at least). While my preference has generally been for merchandise-led events - I used to skip talks and panels at AutoAssembly and general fandom events like the MCM London events - this event was a much more laid-back and intimate affair, allowing me to see a whole bunch of 'stars' as human beings, expressing their unique passions. Learning about Jess Bush's Bee Totem and jewellery line and Mia Kirshner's woodworking was quite fascinating. The biggest surprise was the penny drop of Ed Speleers, the actor behind Jack Crusher in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, being the mumbling teenage wreck promoting Eragon at an event I attended perhaps 20 years ago, who I felt would likely never amount to anything. I love it when I'm wrong. While it was obviously disappointing that neither Nana Visitor nor Babs Olusanmokun were able to attend, the other guests were fantastic.
• RetCon - given that we had effectively been forced to find a new venue at short notice, had less time to sell tickets, and less time for setup on the day, it turned out to be a huge success. Many of the guests said they'd like to return, and we pre-sold over 100 tickets... which may not sound like much, but it's the highest number of pre-sales we've had so far, despite the significantly shorter sales window. There were downsides to the new venue, but hopefully nothing we can't address for future events. In the aftermath, we got loads of excellent feedback, including a write-up in Pixel Addict magazine describing this year's show as "the social event of the decade".
• Sinners - I went into this movie knowing very little about it, other than that it had been compared to From Dusk Till Dawn... the only similarities are that it features criminal brothers facing off against vampires and it's set mostly in a bar/club. It's a fantastic and fantastical movie with compelling lore all its own, and the 'dancing through time' sequence was both unexpected and breathtaking.
• The Fall (Restored/Extended) at the London IMAX - I'm huge a fan of Tarsem and his oeuvre, but The Fall is probably my favourite for its dreamlike presentation, beautiful cinematography, stunning costumes, and brilliant performances from the central cast. Hearing some of the behind-the-scenes details from Tarsem Singh himself, in the Q&A afterward, was an unexpected bonus, and it's nice to see this labour of love finally getting the attention it deserved on its initial - very limited - release.
• Superman - it was, sadly, impossible to avoid some spoilers on this one but that didn't really matter in the end. If I had a Superman that I called 'mine', it would have to be Christopher Reeve. Hokey as those movies were, he understood the assignment and portrayed Superman and Clark Kent as wholly different people, both fully rounded and convincing. Then came Brandon Routh, who did a great job in a single, sub-par movie, and Tyler Hoechlin doing a surprisingly good job as the TV Dad of Steel. Zack Snyder's take on Superman was a disaster, both because his Christian Scientist leanings presented an ugly, arrogant, detached version of the 'hero' in an unnecessarily GrimDark setting, and because Henry Cavill just ain't that good an actor: he can stand around looking moody, but his character range is sorely limited. Now comes a new Superman, in a movie that is true to the playful vibe of the Christopher Reeve series and celebrates the hero's humanity rather than exalting his otherness and his superiority. Oh, and Krypto was amazingly cute. Looking forward to Supergirl in 2026.
• Apex Predator - the Hampstead Theatre is one that Courtney and I had still not been to, despite many theatre trips, both as singletons and as a couple. This interesting take on vampires was all the excuse we needed to pay the place a visit. At just 100 minutes - including the interval - the play is short and rather underdeveloped in a lot of ways but, as I remarked to Courtney afterward, it could have been developed into a six-episode mini-series to expand on the lore and the relationships between its four main characters, or it could have been a play of three hours that outstayed its welcome, so I think it struck the right balance. The presentation was simplistic, but very well used... but I can't help thinking about the scene change in which Sophie Melville  basically yeets her character's baby (a doll, obviously, but treated as a real baby during the play) off-stage. It's also a little curious that the play sets up her character as potentially having mental health issues beyond the postpartum depression, and there's a huge element of doubt about her experiences during the story thrown in at the denouement... but it then ends revealing that she's been right all along... It might almost have been more satisfying if it had turned out she'd made it all up.
• Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Courtney and I are both fans of the books, radio plays and TV show (though not the misbegotten and laughably unfunny 2005 movie), so the announcement of a stage show at Riverside Studios - one of our more local theatre spaces - had us both excited. It's more of an 'immersive theatre experience', spread across several studios, which wasn't at all what I expected, but it was a thoughtful precis of the series, and kind of made me want to read the books again.
• Babylon 5 - I saw (most of) this when it was first broadcast on terrestrial television, but it was all new to Courtney. I got the complete series on DVD gifted to me by a friend (who'd had the set left with him at his workplace, because that seems to happen quite a lot!), so we were able to blast through all five seasons quite quickly and, on second viewing, it was obvious that I'd missed episodes here and there. Regardless, given the overall arc of the first four seasons, it was quite chilling to watch in light of certain events in the world over the last year or so. "Eerily prescient" is a phrase that springs to mind. Behind the scenes history turned out to be just as stunning as the show itself, from Michael O'Hare's schizophrenia, Mira Furlan being effectively blacklisted in and exiled from her home country, Jeff Conaway's addiction issues, health issues of various other cast members, to learning that Jerry Doyle went on to become a Fox News pundit.
• Alias - Another one I mostly watched on TV years ago, but new to Courtney. We started watching this after finishing the single season of B5 follow-on Crusade, and to break up the unremitting grimness of Millennium. It's a compelling, yet frequently ridiculous spy drama with tween romance, so it comes across like Bond crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The guest stars are phenomenal, and the twists in season two were legitimately shocking. It's easy to see how JJ Abrams became such a hot property based on his earlier works, but the signs of his tendency toward going quickly off the rails are also quite apparent in Alias, and some of the characters - particularly the protagonist's father - are hopelessly inconsistent. One of the craziest aspects is that the male lead, played by Michael Vartan, is so utterly bland compared to Bradley Cooper's journalist character, Greg Grunberg as Vartan's CIA buddy, and even Victor Garber's emotionally repressed/absent father character. Courtney describes him as "dry white toast", and it really seems as though the only thing that qualified him for the role was his fluency in French.
• An impromptu Doctor Who (2005) Season 1 Marathon - On a whim, on Boxing Day evening, my folks, Courtney and I started re-watching the first season of (the original) Nu-Who, just as a way of killing time. Also, given that Russell T Davies' most recent series was utter garbage, it felt like a good time to revisit the first time he rebooted the show, 20 years ago. While even the first season wasn't without its flaws, RTD's own writing for Christopher Ecclestone was more focused, more nuanced and, frankly, cleverer than the absolute trash he offered Ncuti Gatwa... In my opinion, he's never been a good writer of Science Fiction, but at least he wasn't giving us goblins on a flying sail ship or extradimensional 'gods'. However, on the subject of flaws in the earlier series, his treatment of the show's only recurring non-Caucasian male character was similarly toe-curling. I don't know what happened to RTD after that - other than his fanwank casting of David Tennant as the subsequent Doctor - but both his storylines and his character writing have taken a serious nosedive, to the point that bringing him back for a show that partnered with Disney, and all their resources, was a fatal mistake. Fan theories of where his writing was going have always been better than the actual stories, but the latest couple of series were an abject waste of money and some fairly bold casting choices.
• MPM-15 Brawl - it had been years since I bought a Masterpiece figure that wasn't a Third Party analogue and, after the disappointment-with-caveats that was Bonecrusher, I ordered this guy (at a slight discount, though not quite so cheap as Bonecrusher) and was instantly impressed at the amount of attention lavished upon him in terms of detail paint applications. The blast effects are rather disappointing in comparison, but the figure looks great in either mode.
• UT R-09 Red Destroyer - Unique Toys continue to amaze me with engineering that is largely quite straightforward, but nevertheless produces phenomenally good robot figures that transform into stunningly accurate vehicles. The cut corners on this one are sadly quite obvious, mine also has a missing paint application, some aspects of its transformation are a little crazy and, strangely, the head isn't actually fixed to the body (seemingly due to the head swap gimmick on the upcoming Bumblebee retool/reshell)... but it's still an excellent figure.
• 52Toys BeastBox and BeastDrive - I've been seeing BeastBox around for years and basically dismissing them because they 'only' turn into boxes (as the name would imply), but I picked one up on a whim, and the found myself buying more because of the excellent engineering and the surprisingly poseable beasts. I'm particularly looking forward to the new Alien: Earth series, which is far more detailed than their older Alien and Predator figures. So far, I only have one BeastDrive figure, and that was bought for Courtney, but these come in kit form, so I'll be keeping an eye out for new releases. 
• Jake Paul vs Anthony Joshua - I don't give a rat's arse about 'celebrity' boxing, but when I heard that Joshua had not only won, but broke Paul's jaw in the process, I couldn't get to Google fast enough. This was an early Christmas present for many people, most of whom would love to get in the ring with the arrogant, racist, avaricious, self-aggrandising parasite. However, any sign that it might have been a wake-up call for the entitled former YouTuber now touting himself as a sportsman evaporated in the post-fight press, when his agent claimed Joshua only won because he's five inches taller. Thing is, even if Paul persists in this fantasy of being 'a professional boxer' rather than a rabid publicity hound who solves every problem by throwing money at it, every future opponent now knows he has a glass jaw, because those things don't heal well... So the audiences will know that any future opponent who doesn't try to break it again is only in it for the enormous payoff, and gives less of a damn about the integrity of the sport than even I do.

Disappointments of 2025:

• "Shredhead"? Really? - Daniel Warren Johnson has (somehow) won almost universal praise for his run on the TransFormers comic thusfar, including winning an Eisner award. Considering he's retelling basically exactly the same origin story of the arrival of Cybertronians on Earth, just with a massively cranked up body count (both human and robotic) and an utterly horrific art direction, it feels to me like an Asylum mockbuster of the Bayverse franchise, but with cartoonish robots turning into realistic vehicles via hand-drawn artwork that is every bit as ugly and overcomplicated as the movies' worst excesses. Then, just seventeen issues in, having killed off more than a dozen canonical characters for no good reason, he introduced his own vanity character, Shredhead, a sort of Edgelord Wheeljack built by the Well of Sparks, out of a wrecked terrestrial van and a bunch of Sparks that Cliffjumper had conveniently been hanging on to (because that seems like something Cliffjumper would do). Leaving aside that "Shredhead" is a name straight out of an angsty teenager's sketchbook, or a crossover either with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or some edgy skateboarding company, his design was a mixture of Cybertron/Galaxy Force First Aid and G1 Wheeljack, while the fact that he wields a sword makes him a sad knockoff of IDW's Drift - another vanity character. And all this on top of the constant fanwank about the alleged 'emotional depth' of the writing and the 'powerful storytelling', when everything I've seen of it reads like a 12-year-old's bad fanfiction. There comes a point where the "no-one is safe" school of storytelling just becomes a kind of reverse plot-armour, and whatever dramatic weight a character's death might have had is lost because they've barely had two lines of dialogue. Of course, I'd have to read it to be sure, but what I've seen of it in previews suggests it's cynically parasitising the legacy of the brand rather than adding to it.
• Hearing about former colleagues' toxic work situations - there aren't that many colleagues I've chosen to keep in touch with, and even with those few, it can be quite some time in between periods of contact. After I got my new job, I was in touch with several who remained with the company I left in 2018, even after the buyout. I was aware that the situation for one of them had been made toxic almost by default when the new owners put more stock in tales told by a couple of problem Editors than in their own experience of one of the Sales Managers. More recently, I heard that one of the most gregarious and fun people I'd worked with there is now keeping herself to herself and keeping her head down whenever she's in the office. Near the start of the year, I heard she was off work due to injury, and not even in a position to start looking for something else... but she has at least reached the point where she sees that's her only real option.
• Extra freelance work - not to seem ungrateful because, honestly, last year's freelance work was very much needed... but, having found myself a full-time job and introduced one client to a former colleague who decided to go freelance this year, I was hoping they'd contact her for their 2026 updates... Instead, they insisted they wanted 'continuity' this year, and that the changes would be minimal. That remains to be seen... They've already increased the pagination of the booklet.
• Age of the Primes - generally, I mean. While some fans are repeating the same old "best G1 we've had in years" copium, and collectively jizzing their pants over the Primes themselves, I can't help but see the line as a massive step backward. Bad enough that the Legacy Stunticons emulated the lazy TV show animation model by just slapping cars onto a blocky Menasor framework, they repeated the same trick with Silverbolt and the Aerialbots. Onyx Prime is a decent figure, but a terrible TransFormers toy, and the rest just seem lazy, with much of the line being just a continuation of Legacy.
• Retro G1 - I like the idea of this... and Gears was OK... but the concept of repackaging toys designed to resemble their original animated counterparts with new heads and calling that 'Retro G1' is misleading. The fact that my second purchase, Brawn, literally crumbled after some attempted customisation put me off further purchases.
• MPM-14 Bonecrusher - this one really could (and should) have been on my Highlights list. The engineering is great, the transformation is involved without being frustratingly complex, and the poseability is surprisingly good for a figure of his size and awkwardness... but he feels unfinished. Not just due to the miserly paint job - though that very much tips the balance against him - but because his arms are rather untidy and his hands are barely articulated. The flame effects are a fun addition but they are entirely without paint, so they look like jelly rather than fire. On the upside, I got him at a substantial discount. Frustratingly, it seems there's an oversized knockoff on the way... with articulated hands.
• More Robosen TransFormers - with the reveal of Soundwave, close to the end of the year, Robosen's line of premium branded self-transforming robots reached a new low in my opinion. Aside from the slap in the face of being priced well outside the means of most fans, at at time when many are struggling to afford the basic necessities like food, rent and domestic heating, its transformation takes some utterly bizarre shortcuts - similar to, but more extreme than even the oversized MP figure - leading to it looking worse than Hasbro's most recent efforts. It's "realistic walking motion" is like the shuffle of a human who's just shat their pants, and the fact that it acts as a Bluetooth speaker feels like the bare minimum of character-appropriate features. Where they're going next, I don't know... but each one so far has been a novelty whose cost vastly exceeds its value.
• Doctor Who (2023) Season 2 (aka Doctor Who (2005) Season 15) - I mean, where do I start? The lazy and desperate retcon of the entire (short) season due to the lead actor's decision to get on with his life while Disney and the BBC prevaricate; the utter waste of the Rani and Omega, both despatched in the most anticlimactic way imaginable, and the latter being yet another oversized, ill-conceived CGI horror show; the absolute nonsense of bringing in Carole Anne Ford for the briefest of appearances as Susan, only to wave it away as inconsequential, when most of the fandom had been begging for her return for years... And that's just from the last two episodes. 'Highlight' episode, 'The Well' - billed as a sequel to 'Midnight' - was nothing more than cheap knockoff, bloated with simplistic horror movie tropes, where the whole modus operandi of the 'returning' adversary is entirely different from the original. Meanwhile, fluff episode 'The Interstellar Song Contest' had some fun aspects, and could have been great if it hadn't all been crammed into 45 minutes, but even that was spoilt by mawkishly overwrought writing and a hopelessly out-of-character Doctor torturing a character who, objectively, wasn't even the villain of the piece. Internal consistency went out the window, while the previous season's weird fixation on so-called 'gods' continued, yet still failed to fit a narrative framework that only paid lip service to Science Fiction. Then there's the episode that reintroduced Ruby Sunday purely to play a spiteful trick on her, which didn't even make any sense: Conrad had direct experience of the Doctor, aliens, etc. and yet his aim was to use social media to expose and debunk UNIT? If the BBC showed the depths of its desperation in bringing back Russell T. Davies to run the show again, RTD let his profound disinterest in giving the first (canonical) non-caucasian Doctor any worthwhile material... And throwing in a regeneration into Billie Piper just felt like stunt-casting to fill a void that could very well lead to David Tennant returning again... Assuming the show ever comes back for a 'third' season in this new run. What's next, BBC? Try to coax Steven Moffat back again? Shortly after the series ended, RTD announced he was stepping back from his column in the official Doctor Who magazine due to the uncertainty surrounding the show's future, only for J. Michael Straczynski to express his interest in being the next showrunner. Naturally, some 'fans' were in uproar at the very idea of an American taking on the show... and it seems unlikely that the BBC would consider him but, even in the worst case, I can't imagine it'd be anything other than an improvement on everything since the end of the Matt Smith era under Moffat. It has been revealed that there will be a Christmas special next year - on-set photos have been 'leaked' - and RTD has implied that there will be more to come after that... but unless there's a new showrunner, it just won't be worthwhile. I'd quite like to see someone like Mark Gatiss, Toby Whithouse or Jack Thorne take the reins if Straczynski isn't being seriously considered, but I suspect none of them would be keen on accepting a chalice so thoroughly poisoned by years of mismanagement, starting back in 2017, under Chris Chibnall.
• The War Between the Land and the Sea - aside from being afflicted by the clumsiest title ever conceived, this held some promise. A Doctor Who spinoff, but centred on UNIT rather than Torchwood, and starring the amazing Russell Tovey. Sadly, RTD decided to go with making Tovey's character, Barclay, a blithering idiot from the Admin/Logistics team, cast far out of his depth due to... an Admin error. Appropriate though the 'fish out of water' trope may be to the idea of fishmen invading the surface world, it made for far too many cringeworthy moments in the first episode alone. Not least, rebranding the Sea Devils as 'Homo Aqua' because 'Sea Devils' is racist and "we're better people now". Leaving that aside, it should have been Homo/Homines Aquae or Maris. 'Homo Aqua' means 'man water', which is a whole different thing... unless one assumes RTD is simply taking the piss at this point.
• Tron: Ares - just because Jared Leto put his own money in to making this film happen, there was no reason to cast him in the title role. With his beard, the long, straight (slightly greasy-looking) hair, and his comparatively slight build, he does not look like the 'ultimate soldier' described in the trailers. Most reviews basically amounted to "avoid the film, buy the soundtrack" - by Nine Inch Nails - but I didn't even find that particularly impressive. Ultimately, a Tron movie needs to feature Tron himself and, ideally, carry on more directly from Legacy, rather than being an ill-conceived AI allegory with cod philosophy involving popular music.
• Anthony Joshua's car crash - I only heard about this today (New Year's Eve), and reports so far suggest the car he was in had been speeding. While he was the only survivor of the crash, his boxing career may well be over... Which is probably good news for Logan Paul.

Predictions vs Reality:

• Hasbro's plans to follow Legacy will be more of the same lacklustre G1 reboots - well, Age of the Primes really isn't much more than a continuation of Legacy, but it's not entirely without its highlights. As far as I'm concerned, the vast majority looks like utter rubbish, but there are some cool-looking figures like Onyx Prime... but he looks cool mainly because he doesn't look like a TransFormers toy and, in and of himself, is a rather disappointing toy. 
• Hasbro will continue to push toward digital-only and AI-generated content - This seems to be largely under the radar, but Dungeons & Dragons seems to have really pulled the short straw for the moment, leading to something of a grand exodus to rival TTRPG Daggerheart, not least from the teams of YouTubers who had been promoting D&D so effectively over the last few years. I've said for some time that I believe Hasbro's endgame - as far as Chris Cocks' plans go - is to make TransFormers an augmented reality thing, like Pokemon GO, but without the game. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they went for AI-generated transformations.
• Leadership contests in UK politics - Surprisingly, it's been fairly quiet on that front, aside from the calls for Keir Starmer to step down due to his less than impressive first year on the job. I'm still surprised that Kemi Badenoch has lasted as long as she has as leader of the opposition, considering the Conservatives' fairly obvious disdain for women, people of colour and particularly anyone from outside the Oxbridge set, let alone her frequently disappointing turns during PMQs.
• Nigel Farage to quit the UK - Sadly, this hasn't happened (as such... yet), but it feels more like a technicality than a deliberate choice on his part. He spent more time touring the US decrying the state of the UK and Europe to help back up Trump's meandering rants and advance Kremlin talking points than he spent in Parliament, let alone in his Clacton constituency. There's still time, though... the probe into foreign money influencing British politics, spurred largely by the conviction of Reform's Nathan Gill over the £40K Russian bribes, could well force Farage to run away to a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UK... Like the USA, for example. He has been spouting the very same talking points as Gill was paid to promote, after all.
• More dangerous and divisive rhetoric from the US - Goes without saying... but Trump's announcement of a Hunger Games knock-off to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the United States is particularly dystopian, and the White House ballroom debacle - which is rumoured to be cover for a subterranean data centre - and Trump's narcissistic renaming trip really aren't a good look for the States. Tangentially, Trump failed to live up to his promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and appeared to pivot quite dramatically after meeting with representatives from Russia and several phone calls with Putin. At one point, he was dangling the carrot of offering to provide missiles, but changed his mind after a brief chat with the Russian premier.
• Many battles being fought in US law - Fewer than I'd expected, all told... or, at least, fewer coming up in the news, which is a different thing entirely... but the extrajudicial murder of alleged 'narco terrorists' certainly shows how little the current administration has for the law, US or international.
• Potentially more CEO deaths - Also fewer than I'd expected... after the murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, Brian Thompson, a couple of similar events appeared ever-so-briefly in the news cycle, but disappeared very swiftly... Almost suspiciously so, particularly as one was painted as a mistake - someone caught in a crossfire, essentially, when the killer arrived at the wrong address. I guess the billionaire media barons don't want to draw too much attention to billionaires getting killed, in case it gives their rabid, hateful audiences any ideas.

At this point, I really have no interest in making grand predictions for 2026... I suspect it's not going to be good for most people. Everyday expenses are still increasing and AI is draining resources ever faster, just so a handful of billionaires can use that instead of having to pay humans, even though AI is continually proving itself unreliable and easily influenced. The threat of war seems rather more serious than I'd prefer to contemplate. It really feels like a shit time for the vast majority of people on this planet, with just those pesky billionaires really enjoying themselves (or possibly not, given how hollow and selfish most of their activities are).

However, Courtney's plan to InterRail across Europe for a month is gaining momentum, and we're going to try to figure out if I can fly out to join her somewhere on the Continent, before she returns to the UK, and that's before we've even thought about our next 'proper' holiday together.

Also, my progress with my Ren'Py project(s) has been slightly better this year, owing to having the funds to pay for the services of an artist, and I'm hoping it will continue at a reasonable pace in the New Year. The artist who created the current batch of sprites was moving toward the end of the year, so I've started to look into other artists to progress the backgrounds while she's unavailable. I've been saying I want to publish a demo for a good couple of years already and, as a project I started back in 2020, with a devlog on itch.io as of September 2024, it'd be a real shame if there's still no public demo by the end of 2026. There's still some rewriting to do on the full story, and then a few more art assets to be produced but, as long as nothing goes wrong with the current artist, there is an end in sight for the full story as well.

Aside from this, I've downloaded a couple of other development kits to the laptop, and I've been planning to create something special for RetCon 2026... However, the guy who runs the club suffered a bereavement just before Christmas and has stepped back from it, and potentially the event, indefinitely. He'd already been questioning whether he wanted to keep the club going due to ongoing issues with the venue's management and one or two of the members. Given that another member has already stepped down from running his own club, there's really no guarantee that he'll decide to return. On the upside, we had recently identified a potential alternate venue for the club, not too far from the existing one, so perhaps there will be a new beginning, if and when he's ready to return.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to get back to semi-regular posting on this blog, and will probably include my BeastBox and BeastDrive purchases since they are, technically, transforming robot toys. I also realised that there are not photos for the last two TransFormers Annuals in my collection - 1987 and 88, produced wholly by Marvel UK - let alone even the beginnings of a write-up... So bang goes my idea about doing them as Christmas Specials.

Keep your fingers crossed for more TransForm-A-Blogging soon.