WELCOME
Come in. Make yourself at home.
Welcome to the Nightshade Hall, my little corner of the internet, where I am free to bore my guests with my hobbies; reading, knitting and science fiction.
This is deliberately a cosy place, that harks back to the days when I hand coded my own websites in Dreamweaver. There are books, yarn, tea and probably a cat somewhere. There are also darker corners, because the world is complicated and pretending otherwise has never helped anyone.
If you're willing to accept the challenge, there are six secret messages hidden amongst the artefacts in the Hall. Find them all if you can. A word of warning, though: some of those artefacts could be dangerous. Handle them at your peril. 😈
about me
more about me →I'm a writer, reader, obsessive knitter and enthusiastic observer of the strange little planet we all have to share.
I like science fiction, archaeology, folklore, ghost stories and stories about people who probably should have known better.
recently
I've been trying our Understory, a new reading challenge app for Android and iPhone.
The challenge is to grow your own virtual forest, by logging your reading life. Every day with pages read waters your garden, and the more books you read, and the more genres you log, the more trees you get. There's a social side too, with friends, groups, leaderboards and reading challenges. You can even water other users gardens.
Understory also offers the kind of features you'd expect from a modern reading tracker, including ratings, reading statistics, DNF lists, private reads and Goodreads/StoryGraph imports.
Premium members can contribute towards the site's book catalogue, by correcting genre listings and they can also get involved in real-world tree planting through Understory's reading objectives. It would be nice if the app's developers would offer more information about where those real-world trees are being planted and who is responsible for them, but hopefuly that's something that's coming as the app gets more established.update log
Watching
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Paramount cancelled it...arseholes
Reading
Galileo Storm by Richard Stokes
Murder in space is so me.
Listening
The History Podcast
On BBC Sounds.
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That's all for now. Come back soon.
There will probably be tea.
There will certainly be cat hair.