Yes, that's what I went with for the title. It's cold and I'm tired, plus it's my blog, I'll do what I want.

Usually at the end of the year I like to look at all the stuff I watched, read, played, and listened to, pick my favorites and talk about them. This year, things are...different. Like most folks, I did have PLENTY of time to do more, and yet, I didn't dig into half as many 2020 releases as I did last year. I mean, with movies, I only really watched two: Horse Girl, all the way back in February, and Soul, which came out the other day. Both are good and neat! But they didn't do much for me, really.

The thing is, I DID watch a LOT more movies this year than usual. As of today, my Letterboxd profile says I've watched 205. I watched a whole lot of tokusatsu stuff that was new to me: good stuff like Lady Battle Cop, Cyber Ninja, and Submersion of Japan, along with some absolute garbage like Kamen Rider the First and Return of the Dinosaurs. I got to watch a couple of Ishiro Honda's films from before he made Godzilla, and got into a handful of Andrei Tarkovsky films I hadn't seen, his final movie the Sacrifice probably standing as the single best thing I watched this year next to Andrzej Żuławski's biblical sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe. Both of those are just...incredible.

Speaking of Honda, his biography A Life in Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa was the only book I really devoured this year. Everything else I tried to start reading was just set aside at some point, or I'm still slowly trying to work my way through. With comics, I didn't read even a third of what I did last year, and nothing really stood out to me as exceptional outside of the work of some friends.

My favorite album of the year is definitely Aesop Rock's Spirit World Field Guide, but I can't really articulate why. My favorite SONG of the year is Enlacing by Clipping, a song I just want to swim around float in for hours. Purity Ring's pink lightning hit me harder than anything else by far, and I cry almost every time I listen to it. Momentary Bliss by Gorillaz and Happy by Danny Elfman feel like 2020's big anthems, though.

I guess I watched more TV than anything else, and my absolute favorite thing of the year was undoubtedly Ultraman Z. As part of their push into international markets, Tsuburaya Productions released each new episode on their Youtube channel with English subtitles every Friday night. For over half of this blasted year, I kept up with every episode as soon as I could watch. There were definitely weeks where it felt like the new episode was the only thing I had to really look forward to. It was a lifeline. Such a joyful, exuberant, optimistic show that celebrated the things that make Ultraman so great while also incorporating more elements from Pacific Rim and Evangelion and having some of the best tokusatsu action of all time. I cried through the finale last weekend. It's just so good!

The only 2020 game I played that wasn't a rerelease of something older was my girlfriend's copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and like most everyone else I was hooked for about three months. Nintendo sent me an end of the year review email thing the other day, informing me that I played my Switch more than twice as much this year than I did last year, which comes as no surprise, and Animal Crossing is where the majority of those 350-some hours went. Everything else I bought and played was older. The only new physical release I bought myself was Mario 3D All-Stars, if that tells you anything.

So...yeah, weird year. I just had the hardest time connecting with anything that I wasn't already familiar with to some degree, as you can tell. I didn't seek out anything truly new, nor did I have much desire to. I'll probably continue to feel like this for a while, too. Ugh.

I also usually write about personal accomplishments and goals for next year. The best new habit I picked up was that I stopped going to the grocery store every week. The amount I spend on groceries monthly is still roughly the same, but it's made me better about paying closer attention to what we have and working with that.

I also haven't had a drink since sometime last December, and since early September I've been exercising AND flossing my teeth regularly, habits I will definitely carry try to carry into 2021. I came out to my family as pan and nonbinary, which is kinda huge, but not without its own wrinkles: none of us have really addressed it since I came out. I dunno. I talked about these things already in other posts anyways.

I'm most grateful for our decision to take Nod in for surgery. I'm so glad we took that chance, expensive and risky as it was. I'm so glad he's still with us and doing just fine, and every day when I see him I smile. If we'd lost him back in May, this year would've been so much harder, truly. I love that grumpy old chinchilla so much.

And hey, even though his surgery was such a huge expense, I did pull off the amazing feat of spending quite a bit less money this year altogether! I started keeping track of things in 2019, and at the end of the year was shocked at the totals I came up with, so this year I tried to pay closer attention and stick to some goals. Which worked! Probably thanks to the pandemic keeping me at home with little desire to try to go out and do things, but, y'know. I relied on my credit card more than I wanted to, so that'll be something to watch out for next year. I do almost have it paid off, at least.

As for what next year will bring, I have no clue. I don't have it in me to think about the future, to try and look ahead because I can't even begin to predict what things will look like even a month from now. Slimepunk will return, a new webcomic will launch, and I will keep drawing and painting and making things at some rate, that's about all I know right now. I'm trying to make some plans to post more art on social media and try to get more people to subscribe to Patreon, on top of beefing up my online shop a bit more. We'll see if anything sticks, I guess.

Thanks for being here. I'm glad we made it through this year. Keep living.