It is with a heavy heart that we have to announce Nova will not take place this year as we had hoped.

Hi sceners,

It's Ruairi (rc55) here, I just thought I'd take the time to explain the reasoning why we have chosen to not proceed running NOVA 2021 this year.

Coronavirus: Our government here is due to fully unlock from Coronavirus restrictions on the 19th of July - which is cause for celebration, however the plan is to let the virus run its course while the majority of people here are vaccinated. There is however an exception in that if someone is flagged as having had been near anyone with an active infection, self-isolation is still legally required. With the virus due to spread exponentionally once again, this creates a significant vulnerability should one of our organisers be affected. There is also the issue of international travel during Coronavirus - the rules are volatile and could mandate unreasonable quarantine periods for weekend visitors.

Evoke Date Clash: Our dear and wonderful friends from Evoke Demoparty are running their party online on the same weekend NOVA was due to take place. We had begun talks with the organisers to see if we could maybe have a free NOVA event where we streamed Evoke to the hall so we did not dilute the audience, but sadly this wasn't to be.

FlyBE collapse: Many of our visitors used the FlyBE airline which went out of business around the same time as the pandemic was beginning, complicating travel to the party for many.

Event Insurance ambiguity: Insurance brokers are for the moment still mandating full COVID precautionary measures and we have in no way prepared for this and would have to invest the time to find out what our obligations are - or even if they are still valid.

For those who have prepaid for Nova 2020 and decided to not refund your tickets to pay for Nova 2021, you can still reach out for the refund by emailing me at rc55@rc55.com, or push forward for our next event, whenever that will take place. I'll endevour to contact you all over the next few weeks to get your decision on this.

On a positive note however, we do plan to run an event in the future when the time is right. We've also been in talks with Neil from RMC (YouTube), and may arrange some limited capacity events much later in the year to fill the gap. There will also inevitably be the usual pubmeets as society settles back to normality.

I hope this helps explain our decision, but if you have any questions please feel free to contact me (rc55 on the Demoscene Discord or e-mail rc55@rc55.com.

Many thanks,

Ruairi (rc55) Fullam