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**By Jonathan Cowie: **After half a decade I have at long last updated my personal satellite website at Science-Com.Concatenation.

What happened was CoVID-19, which was a little more dramatic for myself as I had no internet access. Obviously when I was working I had office access, and then I had personal access at my local library cybercafé, voluntary work place and learned scientific society Fellows Room cybercafés. All well and good and things worked just fine… Until CoVID and at a stroke all my internet access just closed instantaneously.

So I stopped updating my personal website (well, my life is quite boring) and focussed on keeping SF² Concatenation going which involved mailing memory sticks (I had to mail books for review in any case) and a couple of local fan members downloading online SF news to USBs which I picked up on my permitted, daily lock-down walks. Then between lockdowns it was frantically accessing stuff. Amazingly, it all worked.

Jonathan Cowie with Moon rock.

And friends rallied round. Here a special shout out to the amazing Dave Langford who – off his own bat – snail-mail posted me paper copies of his monthly Ansible. Meanwhile the paper part of my science journal subscriptions came into their own and this kept me up-to-date which meant that I gave the occasional street presentations to locals on things like CoVID-19 vaccine research — BNT162b2, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 etc (Britain was one of the first countries to have the vaccine rollout).

There were some ingenious workarounds. Digitally savvy fans do not seem to be aware that, in the UK at the time of CoVID, in households whose occupants are all over 65, some 35% do not have internet access! But there is no stopping human creativity.

One of the things that stopped during CoVID was our regular, local pub quizzes. So, during CoVID, the quizmaster would post weekly quiz questions on-line. A friend would access these and I would phone them up and they’d put me on speaker phone. My friends also had a zoom connection with another quiz team member and they also had a land line phone connection with yet another team member that had no internet access. In short four household were connected and so we could do the quizzes. Neat, huh?

Lockdown did give me time to study, which was a plus, and I rotated ‘Google Scholar’ queries around a handful of local friends so I could keep up-to-date. (I rotated the requests so as not to overburden anyone, but surprisingly all welcomed the challenge as lock-down had its boring moments, also, none of my local, non-academic friends were aware of Google Scholar: it was a revelation to them.) Meanwhile, at home I have a physical library of thousands of academic papers garnered over the decades and filed by subject and lining bookshelves, storing carbon and further insulating parts of my home. Not to mention a digital library also of thousands of science papers, so I had good resources to draw upon. All this enabled me to work on my next big project of the decade (more news of which to come in 2026).

With regards to my personal website, I have been updating it off-line but have now, after over half a decade, updated the online version ahead of the aforementioned BIG project launch next summer.

Filers will likely not be bothered with some aspects of this update (the finer points of Earth system science or my personal shenanigans are unlikely to be of interest). However, the science fictional and fan posts might just tickle a few. Some of these have already appeared in my own contributions to File770 (so you may get the occasional sense of déjà vous) but there’s other SFnal stuff there in the mix.

So, if anyone is interested, here are the more SFnal and a few fan highlights of my half decade:

• Royal Mail Narnia stamps
• The 2025 partial eclipse and the 1999 full eclipse with Bob Sheckley
• British mythological creature Royal Mail stamps
• Ian Watson’s wisdom
• 30th anniversary of Romania’s first Eurocon
• 40th anniversary of Britain’s Eurocon cum Eastercon
• The passing of John Burns and Ian Gibson
• Fantasy at the British Library
• Terry Pratchett Royal Mail stamps
• My first SF Film fest since CoVID
• SF² Concatenation and Science-Com used for training ChatGPT? Is this stealing?
• Extrapolations climate SF drama* *
• *Super heroes encourage blood donation *
• DC Comics Royal Mail stamps
• Charles Partington passes Science fiction at the Science Museum
• After 10 years SF² Concatenation’s Eurocon Award arrives
• Star Wars at the first birthday party celebrated since CoVID
• *Alan Grant passes *
• First SF publisher jolly since CoVID
• *BECCON 41st anniversary reunion *
• Russia invades Ukraine and a look back to the 2006 Kyiv Eurocon
• *Welcome to the Soylent Green year of 2022 *
• Dune’s Arrakis is climatologically possible!
• Royal Mail British SF stamps
• *CoVID-19 lockdown begins *

Merry Christmas, Betwixmas and happy New Year to one and all Filers the planet over (and possibly elsewhere knowing some of you).

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