2020 in review

Posted on Dec 31, 2020

What a fucking year, huh?

Christ. We have no idea what to say. This year feels like it’s lasted a decade in itself but went by in a flash. All years feel like that to us, but this one was especially bad. I mean… coronavirus am I right?? Quarantine??? LOCKDOWN??? Whoo-ee. In the words of literally every commercial, these are unprecedented times.

We’d like to think that we made the best out of a bad situation, because we spent 2020 trying to do our damnedest to work on our web presence! We blogged, we streamed, we played games and ate food and wrote as often as we could considering we’re both disabled and very broke all the time and also THERE WAS A PANDEMIC GOING ON! Like, holy shit! A world-wide pandemic that is killing real people! But even then, we kept our noses as close to the grindstone as we could afford to.

This is our first time doing a Year In Review Best-Of Type Article, because it’s our first time we’ve really had enough articles to do something like that. Our blog has grown a lot! Our whole web presence has grown a lot… We’re doing so much more than we even thought possible for ourselves. And we have you all to thank, you people out there reading us. In the eternal words of PBS, Thank You.

So hit the jump, and let’s travel back to the beginning of 2020, the worst year ever, and reminisce… on just how much damn blogging we did.

January: Fucking Nothing

The year started off promising for us, frankly. A whole new decade! This was going to be the year we got our shit together, as so many other people chose. This was even going to be the Year of the Rat! Our favorite animal! What could go wrong?

So we didn’t update the blog at all in January. Oops.

To be fair, we were working on other things. Will had decided to drop commission work for a while and focus on building EggwareXYZ’s brand as our “primary thing”, so we were more focused on our Patreon. Instead of writing blog articles, we were more focused on doing Patreon bonuses - like our podcast! Have you listened to our podcast? Well, if you’re a Patreon subscriber, you can! Are you a Patreon subscriber, by the way? It’s worth it, we swear!

So, there’s no article of the month for January. Sorry, folks. If you were a Patreon subscriber, this wouldn’t be a problem for you!

February: McChicken Biscuit and Chicken McGriddle

February, we decided we were going to give the blog a complete overhaul and start posting on it. Will designed the beautiful layout that you’re looking at now, unless this is in the distant future and we changed it again, in which he probably still designed that so whatever. And you know what was really hot in the fast food world back in early 2020? Breakfast! Man, we love fast food breakfast. 

And, oooh boy, our podcast ended up fizzling out. We really thought we could do it, we swear! It turns out that talking about nostalgia and things we miss was a lot harder than we expected, especially when the rest of the world was slowly being taken over by a mystery virus that was putting everybody on edge. But it was fun, and gave us a good look into what making a podcast is really like… and we do want to do it again!

We also decided to get way more serious about streaming in February. This was the month the Bubsathon happened, the first of many streams that would push us to our limits playing horrible games that only hurt us. It’s kind of what we do primarily now. We feel like streaming shouldn’t be painful, but we like the pain. What else are we supposed to do?

March: Surviving Burger Jones

We actually celebrated our first wedding anniversary in February! We were married on Valentine’s Day in 2019, and we did celebrate it this year… which would’ve made it the last significant “real date” we had before COVID became a concern. Huh. And we spent it at Burger Jones? 

Well, it’s no wonder we pick our Burger Jones article for March. It’s… well, it being not safe for work is the least of our problems. It’s the culmination of years of stupid injokes between Will and Paula. It kind of represents our relationship, we guess. It’s actually, when we think about it, a really significant article. Wow. Fucked up.

This was also the time we began the Lounge stream series, where Will would draw and we’d chat about whatever was on our mind for an hour or two. It became the de facto successor to our podcast. It’s going strong today, and is completely insane and chaotic and horrifying every time. Come check it out!

But sadly, we can’t mention March without acknowledging this is when the Coronavirus crisis began in earnest for us. On March 11th, 2020. Everything changed. Tom Hanks caught it. They cancelled basketball. Trump banned travel from Europe. It was now clear that the virus was here to stay, that no amount of hand-wringing and hoping it would be handled by Asian authorities could help us now.

April: April Fool’s Day is Cancelled

Coronavirus started becoming a big big deal in April, when the first case spikes started happening in America. Suddenly it was here in our homes, across the entire world, uncontained. People were panic buying all the paper goods and pasta they could carry. Every business that had an interior closed down. For a few brief weeks, it seemed like people were taking this seriously.

Then we caught COVID-19.

We have no idea how we got it. We’re still not even 100% sure that we had it, because testing wasn’t as widespread then as it is now so we never managed to get a test, but the symptoms were unmistakable. This was no common cold or flu. We were doing everything right - washing our hands regularly, always wearing a mask in a public space, not going out unless absolutely necessary - but we caught it. We were the first people in our friend group, and at the time of this publication the only people in our friend group, to catch COVID-19.

We were very, very lucky, we want to say. It was a very mild case. We had no significant fever, we had no need to be hospitalized, and we mostly managed with bedrest and locking ourselves in our bedroom and getting food delivered to our home - but it still sucked so hard that we wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It doesn’t feel anything like a normal sickness. The weirdest part is that we felt fine! We had energy, we had lucidity, we could do our work, we felt normal. The only issue was the constant, rasping presence in our lungs that none of our bone-rattlingly deep coughs could clear out. Do you know that feeling of weight in your chest you get when you feel nervous? That slightly hollow feeling, like you’ve got a ball of lead in your sternum? Imagine feeling like that times ten as bad all the time, day and night, awake or asleep. You cough and cough and cough like you’re choking but it does not budge. You can barely breathe. Walking from your bed to the bathroom feels like you ran a mile. Even just sitting straight up in a chair can be exhausting after a few minutes. Oh, and you can’t smell or taste anything, that one is real.

In April, our best article was the cancellation of April Fool’s day, our second article directly related to the Coronavirus. Our first Coronavirus article was a satire of the “Coronavirus Statement” that pretty much every business was emailing people at the time telling you how their delivery people were going to leave their food on the doorstep and how their staff were rubbing every flat surface down with Clorox wipes and shit like that. This shit was a very transparent attempt at advertising under the veil of “Coronavirus safety”, promising you that it’s totally safe to still grab some McDonalds because we’re working our employees to the bone without giving them hazard pay.

May: Fucking Nothing To

With going outside shelved for a while, we turned our attention inward and decided to take a hiatus from the blog for a bit. I mean, it’s not like we could go just go out and get some hot new stupid fast food item to review. We tried to do articles on what we could, when we could: we journaled the weird experience ordering food at Panda Express during the pandemic, and we talked about our local zoo, which was going through some dire straits at the time.

This was a very, very hard time for us. We were recovering from COVID (we’re technically long-haulers! It’s a great experience!), Will’s birthday was absolutely ruined because of the crisis, there was nothing to do except throw ourselves into streaming as often as possible and staying inside as hard as possible. Paula streamed by themself for the first time, and played all of Half-Life! (All of it except Half-Life: Alyx… so watch this space.)

Towards the end of the month, our complaints even started to get petty. We felt itchy to be outside. One of the two Burger Jones was permanently closed, and despite far worse things happening to us and others, little things like that took up disproportionate space in our minds.

Then George Floyd was murdered. 

It’s the kind of thing you don’t expect to happen in your own backyard. You know the police are bad, and innocent Black people are murdered across the country by them. But to see the world galvanize around the very city you live in, to have that cyst of discontent finally burst right in your home, is an insane experience. All of the facts you knew about injustice and the experience of Black Americans are suddenly thrown into harsh light. 

We’re White-passing. We’ve had plenty of bad experiences with cops ourselves, but we’ve never, ever been in a situation where our lives felt threatened. Seeing a member of our own community choked to death for simply being believed to have a counterfeit $20 bill, simply for the color of his skin… Words cannot describe. It’s harrowing. 

We choose no article of the month for May. Rest in peace, George Floyd. 

June: #TonyTigerGate

June revealed something very important to us: Twitter was the worst website in the world, and is a nightmare place to be on. There are no redeeming attributes to Twitter, none at all. 

Ergo, we choose Tonytigergate, a retrospective on one of Twitter’s weirdest moments, as our article for June. If Twitter is a website where sexually harassing a breakfast cereal mascot is to be expected, the general attitude the website took after the murder of George Floyd and resulting protests was no surprise. 

June was still Pride Month, which was an important time for us to do a lot of introspection. And boy, did we do some introspection and decide it was time for us to come out as lesbians! Yeah, we’re gay women! Chew on that! We did a whole series of articles on funny pride related things and those were a bunch of fun. If Twitter wasn’t so horrible this month, we might have chosen something more fun like Top 7 Fallout: New Vegas Gay Moments, but Tonytigergate was the perfect intersection of Pride Month and Twitter stupidity to represent June.

But the most fun part of June was when our car’s serpentine belt broke while we were outside during a sweltering thunderstorm! This led to our triumphant return to podcasting with Boiling Ourselves to Death, the only podcast recorded in a real life overheating car. It’s worth subscribing to our Patreon just to hear us go insane as we wait for the tow truck to arrive. If only we knew this was going to be the first of many car troubles this year!

July: Taco Bell’s menu annihilation

Hylics 2, one of our most anticipated video games of all time, came out in July! We’ve been waiting for that one since 2015 and oh, man, did it deliver. Unquestionably one of our favorite games ever, it was an amazing artistic combination of platforming, RPG, and adventuring we’ve ever seen in a video game.

But that isn’t the mood of 2020. It doesn’t define how the year felt for us. Our article for July is about Taco Bell’s menu changes.

Why did they do this to us? After all the suffering we had already gone through, they had to hurt us more? We miss our potatoes. We miss our hash brown patties. We miss the pico de gallo, and Taco Bell’s pico sucked ass! Why, Yum Brands? What motivated you to be this way? Do you simply enjoy the cruelty? Or was there a deeper purpose we’d never understand? 

Why?

Oh, and speaking of the car, our exhaust pipe basically fell off so we had to get that completely replaced! Like, the entire pipe! It was nearly a thousand dollars to get a new one! Love owning a car, in the world, where entropy exists.

But at least July is when we first tried out VRchat! It’s a fun little game! You can be a furry, or the Iron Giant from the movie the Iron Giant! We see no reason to pick any other avatars.

August: Kraft Breakfast

August is, frankly, a pretty boring month. It doesn’t have a holiday, it’s too hot, and if you’re a kid all you have to look forward to is going back to school. Good thing we’re adults here, and we can talk about adult things. Like Kraft macaroni and cheese.

Our article for August is about Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Breakfast, which was regular Kraft macaroni for breakfast. It was stupid and we hated it. It was a signifier of how boring August was, that they had to make simple macaroni exciting and couldn’t even do anything beyond just slapping a new name on it. Paula’s birthday was in August and we didn’t even get a chance to do anything for it. We knew in the back of our heads that there was no way the Coronavirus crisis would be resolved by summer and we were 100% right. We were busy building a computer for a friend and we spent the day shopping at the local computer store for parts. That was Paula’s birthday party.

But we did play Paper Beast for the first time, and that was a really good experience. Paper Beast is a great game, by the way. Worth getting a VR headset for, no joke. 

September: KFC Fries

September, amazingly, wasn’t that bad of a month for us! We got back into Toontown Rewritten, our favorite MMORPG, because it was Toonfest season which is a special commemorative time of year where you get double XP. Toontown is a fun game, if you like slot machines that tell you when it’s time to pull the lever.

As well, we really got into VRchat, which is extremely fun! Will’s stimulus check came in (very frustratingly late), and he decided to get Paula a very expensive and very belated birthday gift of their own headset, after a month’s worth of watching him play Papered Beast. Having a real headset really opens a lot of gaming opportunities. It finally feels like VR gaming has come into its own in 2020, and we’re not just saying that because we finally got headsets. We’re saying that because we’re having fun with our new headsets.

So, for September, we pick the KFC Fries article to represent this month. September was a time where we decided to get back into writing for the blog, and spend more time outside (in a safe way!). We wanted to review the KFC fries from a place of suspicion and spite, but found something genuinely tasty and enjoyable that really kind of moved us.  It was a genuine out of left field moment that really inspired us to get back into blog writing.

Oh, and Taco Bell cut more stuff from their menu. They got rid of the Mexican Pizza. It’s like being beaten with a stick after getting attacked with a sword. They crave our pain.

October: Wayback - Taco John’s

Sadly, October was nowhere near as enjoyable. Will had injured his knee in a kick scooter incident back in July, but only in October did the damage become evident. He was wracked with terrible pain for weeks that required a lengthy break from going outside (which we were already doing anyway, but even just sitting in the car or walking upstairs became too much) to rest his joint.

As a result of being in extreme sleep-ruining pain, being surrounded by upset and sick friends, and then the fucking election, Will developed a shiny new panic disorder and endured two weeks straight of random panic attacks. Some memorable panic attacks included the first political debate (where he spent the entire debate on the bed having pseudo-seizures), and struggling to listen to Neil Cicierega’s Mouth Dreams album (where he hid in the bathroom and cried for half an hour after Aammoorree).

We even had to go visit a clinic to get all of this checked out, which is something we never do because we’re very broke and hate doctors a lot.

Halloween barely felt real this year. I mean, what has felt real? All holidays have been cancelled one way or the other. It’s not like they were going to let kids run around and breathe on people. So, we turned our attention inward. We picked Wayback Machine Taco John’s as this month’s article, a tribute to what we’ve lost. We used to like getting fast food on Halloween as a special treat, and it feels like we can’t even do that anymore. Man, who knew being under a worldwide pandemic would suck this bad?

November: Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut

Oof, what an election, huh? November was another month that we had a hard time getting stuff done, because streaming and coping with the awful election had us very busy. So, to adequately represent the month of November, we select the Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut review article: terrifying and intimidating as it arrives, but overall a big disappointment. Man, if only Donald Trump losing didn’t come at the price of Joe Biden winning.

Yeah, not a lot happened in November. Thanksgiving was a drag (and cancelled! We cancelled Thanksgiving!) but we had fun watching the Dog Show with friends. Did you know that the dog that wins the Dog Show becomes the only legal dog to own next year? I hope you like Scottish Deerhounds!

Mostly, it was non-stop anxiety over how the election was going because Donald Trump couldn’t leave well enough alone. But in response to that anxiety, we started up our first-ever real tabletop RPG group, with Paula as the game master! That’s lots of fun. Will used the rest of his time wisely by updating his portfolio! You should buy a commission from him! Please?

December: Cheetos Mac ‘n Cheese

December started out with our car troubles finally reaching a head. Our car has been plagued with an oil leak since we first bought it second-hand, and in December we vowed to have it fixed. It turned out that this leak was far more substantial than we thought and ended up having to pay through the nose to get it all fixed. What a disaster! We were left flat broke just in time for our tenth anniversary as a couple, which was bad enough considering we were going to have to spend it right in the middle of Coronavirus Quarantine Part 2: Part 1 Never Ended. 

At least it was also Halloween 2! We don’t know what Christmas is. This month we celebrated Halloween 2 by streaming some of the weirdest and most absolutely frightening games there are, like Nightmare Ned, a game that’s completely ruined our life. We wish Walt Dorhn would leave us alone.

Adding it all together, we have to pick Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Macaroni and Cheese as the article for December. It’s the culmination of everything 2020: awful food, terrifying apprehension, tedious let downs. It’s all wrapped up in a Red #40 wrapper and presented on a cheesy plate. What could be more 2020 than eating terrible boxed pasta that you hate, but can’t stop eating? What a year it has been.

But, in the end, it’s nice to look back and see just how much our blog and overall web presence has grown. We’re not just doing this because we desperately are hoping to make a living off of it - though we do - but because it’s what feels right for us to do. We like blogging, streaming, and making weird stuff for the internet. We’ve always liked it. Having our own website has been a dream for both Paula and Will, and Eggware.XYZ is the culmination of those efforts.

So thank you, reader, for being a part of this journey. We’ve been running this blog for years now, and we can say confidently that 2020 was the worst year ever for so, so many reasons. We’re just happy to have put it behind us.

Tagged: 2020 holidays new year year in review