It's dead, Jim.
Hi everyone, I had hoped to be coming to you all this week with Ep2's release, but when I woke up this morning, my laptop would not power on at all. It had been running animations all night, and just isn't responding at all. So far as I can tell it's toast, but there shouldn't be any damage to my SSD's (hopefully), at least. 
So what does this mean? I've ordered an enclosure for making Nvme SSDs USB drives, Amazon Prime 2-day delivery. So Thursday I should be able to pull the drives out and recover the data I hadn't already backed up to an external drive (it's been a couple of weeks since my last back-up). Depending how far things got before the laptop died, I'll anywhere from one scene and three animations short of the finished ep2 to just one animation short. That will determine what I can do and how quickly.
Unfortunately I'm using my old laptop and it does not have a full GPU, it's just Intel Integrated graphics. I'm looking into options to get Ep2 at least done as quickly as possible, and how to proceed going forward.
Sorry for such bad news.
- Eris.