What Got You Through 2020?

[Queensryche]

So we all know 2020 was a s**tshow of massive proportions. So for those who are still here, what got you through it? I'll start the list:

1. My employer

People who know me personally know how much I praise my employer for how they treat their workers. Well, due to the pandemic, this year they went beyond. I've been working from home since March, as have most of my coworkers, and because of that, my employer is saving tons of money in facilities bills. Part of what they're doing with the savings: passing it on to us. We got our annual bonus early, then during the actual bonus week they gave another bonus, and next week we're getting yet another bonus. The help they've given in helping us adjust to our current conditions has also been phenomenal. I'm grateful for them. If GenCon happens in 2021 (still a big "if" in my opinion) and I feel safe enough to go, I've told friends that the post-con dinner won't be at Fogo de Chao. It'll be at St. Elmo's Steakhouse.


2. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Seriously have passed a lot of time playing this game and developing my island. It's been a blast to play and I've enjoyed it greatly. Since real life means I'm shut in most of the time right now, AC:NH gives me an escape by letting me exist on a virtual island with neighbors to interact with. In general, my Nintendo Switch has provided me with tons of entertainment this year. AC:NH has just been first and foremost.


3. My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom!

I am proud to say I am shoujo trash.

In an overall lousy year, this was a feel-good show. One half wacky isekai and harem hijinks, one half heartwarming story about a girl making the world around her a better place. And it gave us the greatest screencap ever.


(Author's Note: The lethal butt in question was a blunt-force object, not a chemical weapon)


4. The Final Fantasy TCG Community

In-person games were a no-go most of the year, but we found a way to persist. A Discord was started up and virtual games with OCTGN kept the community alive. In the process, I played against players from around the world and we talked a bunch about FFTCG and other things. Whenever this pandemic lets up, there's plans of various communities to travel and see each other. I know I definitely want to get to Frankfurt to see the community there and have some beers, since I talked beer with various German players. For that matter, I'm gonna have to bring players that travel here to The Sly Fox since I've hyped their beers a ton.


So those are the big four things for me that got me through the 2020 S**tfest. What're yours?

[Hogtrail]

My passion is theatre. Live performance is what I do.

Covid said F**K THAT!

Myself and two friends started a virtual theater company, performing world premiere plays over the Zoom platform, free of charge. By encouraging viewers to donate to specific theaters each week, we've raised over $25,000.

That's what I'm most proud of, and what kept me going.

[darkdestiny91]

My year started with me getting out of my job contract (terrible year to do so, in hindsight) but I found something later on in the year.

My hobby of painting and card gaming did help pull through, along with online gaming becoming a bigger part of my life, in a more social way as well rather than playing to climb a ranked ladder or anything like that.

I did also pick up reading again too, which really helped.

That's how I survived 2020.

[dilbert505]

What the heck, I might as well chime in. I was fortunate to keep my job throughout the year, and I have a very remote-friendly position, so I'm not likely to be ordered back to campus until fully vaccinated at this rate. It's been tough at times, but still, knowing that I have job security has been a huge relief. Keeping my spirits up, though, that falls on a handful of other activities:

1:Cracking the Cryptic. Who knew that the most relaxing thing I could do this year was watch two soft-spoken British men work through Sudoku puzzles? I was interested in puzzles to begin with, to be sure, but once I found the channel, I got into Sudoku in a much bigger way. It's kind of the perfect way to dissociate from anything stressful; all you have to do is look for the next logical piece of information to help you solve the puzzle. At the beginning of the year, I had no idea this channel existed. As of 12/31, I own 6 of their Sudoku apps, have backed their Kickstarter, and am considering joining the Patreon, too, and it's all money well spent.

2: Civilization VI, and related, the Youtubers Potato McWhiskey, The Spiffing Brit, and The Saxy Gamer. I bought Civ VI when it came out, and immediately hated it. The split tech and civic trees were cool, but basically every other change they made felt like a downgrade from Civ V. Progress was slower, I didn't grok the changes well... not a great experience. A few months ago, though, I came back to the game, and around 50 hours later, not counting the time I spent watching Civ videos on YouTube, I finally get it, and am back to that "just one more turn" feeling I get with every Civ game.

3: Retro Repairs. Another YouTube channel (there's a theme building here), in this case a channel about (spoilers) repairing retro video games and consoles. Over the years, I've become much more of a retro gamer, as I find myself with less time/patience to learn new games, so I've gotten more and more interested in repairing old systems and getting them to work. This channel piqued my interest enough that Christmas revolved around all the tools of the trade; a soldering iron, a fume extractor, solder sucker, basically everything I see used on the channel (aside from the really expensive stuff; I know better than that.) I have some old Game Boys and Game Gears to get started with, and I'm looking forward to seeing if I can bring them back to life.

4: Hades. This one's only been for the past month, but man, I have had so much fun with this game, and I almost don't know why. I don't tend to play frenetic action games; this is a frenetic action game. I hate isometric perspective; this game is in isometric perspective. I don't play a lot of new games; Hades officially released in September. Despite all that, though, the story sucked me in, the gameplay was difficult without being too overwhelming, and I've absolutely loved it. Highly recommended to anyone who likes roguelite action, engaging stories, Greek mythology, or snark. The Twin Fists are still the best weapon, fight me.

5: The randomizer community on Twitch, primarily Final Fantasy IV: Free Enterprise and Super Metroid + A Link to the Past Randomizer. So, about that whole retro game thing: retro games by themselves are great. What's even better than that? A game you know inside and out, but changed in a way that leaves you with something new to discover and figure out every time. Free Enterprise and SMZ3 do exactly that, with games I've known and loved for 25+ years. Free Enterprise starts you off with two random characters, a random either key item or high level piece of equipment, an airship, and a dream. Your goal: complete a series of objectives and punch Zeromus' face in. Or is it Ultrosmus? Or Sansmus? There are dozens of flags and hundreds of settings that can customize a game, turning it into either a scavenger hunt, essentially a boss rush, a tour of the three worlds, or anything in between. SMZ3... turns out that both Super Metroid and A Link to the Past used about half of the available ROM addresses on their cart, back in the day. It also turns out, they used mostly different ones. Some absolute geniuses looked at that and went... "We can stitch those together, can't we?"SMZ3 was born. You start in Crateria, as Samus (or whatever sprite you picked), with a gun. From there, you have choices: go down into Brinstar, and find (hopefully) the Morph Ball or Speed Booster or something that can get you further... or take that one door you never go in, the one that leads to a map room... only it's not a map room this time. It's HYRULE. SM items can be found in Zelda, Zelda items in SM, and you only win once you've defeated both Ganon and Mother Brain. I absolutely love both of these, and have played maybe a couple dozen SMZ3 seeds, and probably over a hundred FE seeds (guess which one's easier to complete?) These games are all over Twitch, on the Randomania channels, Speed Gaming, RPG Limit Break, and the Free Enterprise channel, not counting the channels for the individual players.

(And if those games aren't your jam, there's FF1 Randomizer, Dragon Warrior Randomizer, FFV: Career Day, FFVI: Worlds Collide, Zelda: Ocarina of Time Randomizer, Mega Man... well, I think all the Mega Man games have randomizers... there are hundreds now, for every conceivable type of game. Randomizers are amazing.)

6: Oh, yeah, there's also this little side thing called Raw Deal. That was kind of important to me, too.

Some other things worth mentioning, in case they're someone else's jam as well, and they don't know about it (all of these are YouTube channels, since that's what I'm looking at): Jelle's Marble Runs (all the fun of sports, without the possibility of people getting sick and dying of COVID!); WrestleTalk, and specifically their game show, Quizzlemania (the greatest wrestling quiz show started during the pandemic on YouTube, and the source of several in-jokes that I have to fight myself not to make because literally 0 people I know will get them); Dominic Noble, and his show Lost in Adaptation (compares popular media to the books that they are based on, and evaluates them for accuracy and effectiveness; also cats); Hildegard von Blingin' (tomorrow's greatest hits, 600 years ago! Bardcore for the discerning lord and/or lady), and probably a hundred others.

Here's hoping we have a year we don't want to see end, next year, but one that still lets us appreciate the new things that we've come to know and love.

[Rebort]

It’s hard to have this conversation, as I know some people are truly struggling, but 2020 had zero effect on my life. I travelled more in our 3 months of quarantine than I have in 5 years and living in Minnesota and receiving $600 per week during said quarantine along with traditional unemployment, financially I’m fine (until taxes). I have a comfy job at a casino and it boggles my mind how much traffic we have on a daily basis (we’ve had 8 of our top 20 cash drop days all time since reopening). I also bought a liquor store in April.

So idk. It’s not bad for everyone. Feels a lot like the housing crash of 2008. The media made it sound like every house on the block was up for sale and literally everyone got laid off.

Makeplayingcards was the highlight I guess. It’s gonna be a bummer when I don’t need anything printed until the new set comes out, but then it’ll be like old times.

[KD8ESU]

1:Cracking the Cryptic. Who knew that the most relaxing thing I could do this year was watch two soft-spoken British men work through Sudoku puzzles? I was interested in puzzles to begin with, to be sure, but once I found the channel, I got into Sudoku in a much bigger way. It's kind of the perfect way to dissociate from anything stressful; all you have to do is look for the next logical piece of information to help you solve the puzzle. At the beginning of the year, I had no idea this channel existed. As of 12/31, I own 6 of their Sudoku apps, have backed their Kickstarter, and am considering joining the Patreon, too, and it's all money well spent.

Before I get into mine, I wanted to say that I'm glad I'm not the only man of culture and taste on TCO.


With that, I'm going into what my 2020 was:
1.  Work.  I work in distribution for a major Fortune 500 company (Dollar General, specifically); and when the Toilet Paper and Paper Towel shortages began around mid-February, I not only got busy at work, but I also stepped up in a major way.  It ended up taking a lot of my time, but I have been specifically pointed out for helping get things sorted out by the big bosses.

2.  Investments.  Between the "stimulus" and all the extra Overtime (plus, no Conventions to go to, or London which I'll get into later), I was able to start getting into investing.  It's actually interesting to get into this, plus it gives me something that I can eventually pull from if I leave my primary employer.

3.  Martial Arts.  I know I'm going to be getting a lot of people yelling at me for having the balls to have human interaction; but it's been the only consistent thing I ever had in my life and I consider more of these people family than some of my actual family.  With that, I got involved in helping one of our guys on his third book in the Aiki Secrets series and I started putting notes down for a project I've had going on in my mind for a few years now.  Plus, I also made new friends (and got to roll with a THIRD member of the Gracie family).

4.  Pokemon.  To be fair, this was also in late 2018 and 2019, but friends I made in the PTCG and GO communities ended up also becoming close friends as well.  Granted, their Worlds in London got canceled in 2020 (and with the U.K. looking more and more like they're going to lock people into homes and not allow them to do anything indefinitely, 2021 seems unlikely), but the entire community has rallied together and I'm glad to be a part of it.

[Scotty]

I don't have time to type explanatory paragraphs, but want to participate!

What Got Me Through 2020
Family (wife and two kids!)
Pokemon (started selling some old cards for big cash and collecting new cards I like)
Work (Financial Advisor, and I saw the entire spectrum of worst-hit to not affected)

What I Lost
Soccer (and most physical activity...)
Raw Deal in person (thankful for OCTGN!)