And what a year it has been!

I remember looking forward to 2020, with 2019 being an all round awful year. Christian Faber had been teasing Bionicle things for a very long time and eventually we even got a date for something. I was also going to get a chance at entering a 3D design course at a university, a possible career setting prospect. A long time friend was planning on making a visit to Copenhagen all the way from Romania. I had spent a wonderful new years celebration that time visiting the family of a beautiful girl. Yes, 2020 was going to be an improvement over 2019.

Then it started with SARS-COV-19. Everything went tits up. No classes, no Bionicle, no summer visits from friends, no holidays to visit my family in France. People getting knee-jerk panic reactions to the pandemic and emptying supermarkets of the most useless things. People not taking the pandemic seriously and endangering others. People flat out denying the pandemic is real, amounting the situation to yet another conspiracy theory. The effects of climate change setting everyone's back yards on fire amidst the outcries that climate change isn't a concern or isn't even real. Racist, corrupt policemen killing black people in the most fucked up way possible, resulting in a completely useless riot that achieved absolutely nothing. The biggest irony being the charities that popped up to help black owned businesses rebuild after the Black Lives Matter riots destroyed them. The areas that decided to police themselves but ended up in complete anarchy with literal murder happening. "Let's replace the police and be better than them" they said, while proceeding to be much worse than the police. China being China to Hong Kong. That's still happening, by the way. Star Trek still being owned by CBS, a company completely bereft of any inventive, inspirational and progressive talent of any kind. My potential future girlfriend parting ways because apparently what I had to offer wasn't good enough for her. That was shortly after I had spent two whole weeks of my life trying to create the most advanced painting I've ever made, testing my theories and pushing my skills to the limits, to make what was essentially a stylised portrait of her for her birthday. Not to mention the money I was saving to plan for a second date. That money went into bicycle maintenance.

I'm sitting here trying to think of something, ANYTHING, truly positive that has happened in 2020, but it's really hard... Nigh on impossible. Especially after the day before yesterday (at the time of writing) my bicycle got stolen right when I was starting my work shift. It was the last work shift of 2020, the potential for a nice fat bonus, ultimately securing my ability to upgrade my PC in January. But I need my bicycle for my job, and it got stolen in the 4 to 5 minutes I spent in a Lidl to buy a bottle of water.

No, 2020 was not a good year. Not for the world and not for myself. Nothing went right. Nothing went smoothly. Personally I've achieved very little of anything this year.

I simply... Made do.

For more neutral things:

I'm still working on a large commission for a Discord server full of Sergals. While the concept and payment was done in autumn 2019, actual drawing started at the start of 2020 in January. Before that people were still deciding where all the characters were supposed to go.

This means on the 1st it will have been in progress for a whole year. Barring some minor edits, I want to focus on actually completing it, so I won't be taking commissions until it's done.

Once the Sergal Server commission is done I'm going to hunt for a programmer. Something I was hoping to achieve much with this year was Nach, the game project I spent years struggling to bring to life. But I'm far better with designing and concepting than I'm with programming, so large portions of the time we're spent on banging my head against a wall.

Those are the plans for 2021. I so hope it's going to be a better year...