It's been quite a time here as well. Finally lost my mother to cancer on the 1st, so New Year's Day 2022 got to be a "new beginning" in more ways than one, and not happily so either. By the way, if you think people claiming someone died "peacefully" is actually truthful, in cases like this anyway, you have another thing coming to you. Or at least I'm not going to pretend to know what it's like to go through those "death throes" that based on the information from hospice are all too normal, to say nothing of the decline leading up to them.
Posting here more would make a good new year's resolution for many of us I suspect, not the least of whom being me. All the insight I've gleaned simply by bothering to actually study various series over the past handful of years isn't doing much to cure ignorance and advance appreciation of those cartoons and artists if it's largely just sitting inside my brain; and I'm not all that inclined to start a blog or website for it, as if this community needs even more fragmentation of that sort. This forum could use more nerding out about the films themselves, the people behind them, and their artistic sensibilities and styles, not unlike back in the GAC and early IAD days. It's not like there aren't things to discuss—especially when you go beyond the traditional comfort zones and give the more neglected things their due. But us cartoon nerds that still come around here seem to have slid into a rut of just lurking and waiting for the other guy to come up with something. Heck, Patrick even opened up the "Cartoon Discussion of..." board for all of us to showcase cartoons "whenever we feel like it", and we have yet to do anything with it. Simply liking cartoons and reading about them, and merely discussing new restorations or TV airings that are coming out, is easy; it takes actual brainwork to reflect on why films deserve attention (or not) or study them and their history, and to write about it.