A while back I discovered Neocities and started up a little website, rotheche.neocities.org. It's great fun, I'm really enjoying it. It's a throwback to the early days of the web, but refined a bit as far as the UI goes. Drop by; I haven't put a guestbook or anything on there yet, but I'll get around to it.It's focused on a couple of areas. I put a new pic of the day up once every few days, so photography. And reading - both tracking what I'm reading in 2025 plus the state of Mount TBR, which looks a little something like this:

• Chapelwood: The Borden Dispatches 2, by Cherie Priest
• Mrs Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan
• The Bass Rock, by Evie Wyld
• The Gods Below, by Andrea Stewart
• The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison and J Michael Straczynski
• The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir
• Bloom, by Delilah S Dawson
• The Duke Who Didn't, by Courtney Milan
• Blood Covenant, by Alan Baxter
• The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera
• Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Not Quite by the Book, by Julie Hatcher
• Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
• Never Flinch, by Stephen King

That last one is new today. Never Flinch is another Holly Gibney novel, so it's pre-ordered and will be here in a few months.  On King, as I write this I'm listening to the latest episode of the KingCast; he's talking about Never Flinch and about working on a sequel to The Talisman and Black House that he wrote with Peter Straub. I read and reread The Talisman but only read Black House the once, I can't remember why (did it start in second person plural or something?). I think I'll have to reread them at some stage. Maybe the TBR list should have a TBRR (to be re-read) section...

The TBR list should also include a bunch of year's-best type anthologies in fantasy, SF and horror, plus a couple of months' worth of Clarkesworld and Forever magazines, but there are so many of those.

More recently I've added what I'm calling the Pratchett Project. I managed to miss a lot of Discworld; somehow I never got hold of them when Pratchett started writing them, despite being a very heavy F&SF reader and then there were what felt like millions of them, too much to catch up on. So here we are, I've never read most of them. I have listened to Jingo as an audio book and seen a couple of animated adaptations (Soul Music, Wyrd Sisters) and the Hogfather live action adaptation, and I know I tried (and bounced off) The Source of Magic years ago.  So the Pratchett Project is me catching up on that. I've started off with the Death series, mostly because the library didn't have Guards! Guards! in at the time.  I've read Mort and Reaper Man, and reviews are up on the site; I've just started Soul Music and have Hogfather handy.

I've been off work for a bit (medical issues) and one of the things I've really, really enjoyed is time to read, time to go to the library, and reading real paper books. I've been an almost exclusively ebook reader since Amazon first came out with the Kindle — I love the convenience, and being able to 'carry' a couple of thousand books with me, as well as buy more instantly (this is part of why Mount To Be Read is the size it is) — but I find it's easier to bury myself in a paper book than an ebook for some reason. Ebooks are more interruptible, somehow. When we moved house in 2012, we sold a lot of books because they were all available as ebooks, and it would have saved us so much effort unpacking so many of them. (In fact, selling them more than paid for the hire of the moving truck, that's how many we had.) But the library and time to read...that's a luxury I'm really going to miss when I go back to work.

So it's 2025 all of a sudden - how did that happen?

2024 was a hell of a year. I had breast cancer - not the worst kind, it was DCIS, which resulted in a 'Goldilocks' mastectomy and a massive boob reduction for me. Pathology found LCIS in the other breast - another early kind of cancer, usually noninvasive, hard to see on mammograms, but often a flag for other kinds of cancers developing. Might have been related to the DCIS, but who knows? So I'll have monitoring going forward to be sure, even though I don't have a lot of breast tissue left.

While I've been on leave from work, I set up a little website over on Neocities. I love this - the first websites I ever made were handcoded or Geocities, and in an era of blink and marquee tags, webrings and the like. Unfettered creativity and quite a lot of weirdness - I miss that era in all the current-day homogeneity on the web now. So I'm using it for tracking my reading in 2025, and doing a photo of the day thing.

The other thing I'm doing is, after recovery, getting back into the gym. Fitbit has recently added a cardio load/target cardio load feature that uses your activity levels over the last few weeks and your goal or either maintaining or improving cardio fitness to set a target cardio load - basically how much you work during the day, whether from incidental activity or from a planned workout. Since I've been recovering from surgery, my baseline is pretty low - so as I've been getting back into exercise, my Fitibt app keeps telling me I'm overdoing it, to a pretty high degree. Considering I've always been overweight and, until the last few years, on the unfit side, I'm finding this pretty funny - I'm not even back to half my usual training load, so god knows what it's going to do in a month or two when I'm fully recovered and really back into it.