I have done three out of four things right with climate. I eat only plants. I do not drive. I do not fly. Three for four. My failure that torments me every day is that I have not been able to convince all of my friends and fam. That is my failure. I just never figured out how.

I read Skeptical Science. They read delayist web pages like Omni or DN. And some of them voted for delayist politics.

Many of my friends and fam fly more than the average. (Some don’t and that’s no thanks to me but I appreciate it all the same. ♥︎) And when I talk to them it’s clear that they aren’t making this decision informedly. They don’t know how urgent and how big the question is.

So that’s all on me I guess. I didn’t exlain it clearly and credibly enough. They think I’m a hysteric exaggerator. If I had been saner or well-adjusteder or healthier instead of crazy-aunt-madwoman-in-the-attic I had been more credible and they woulda listened. But I wasn’t so they didn’t.

And I knew how bad it was. It’s not their fault because they didn’t know but it is my fault because I did. Everytime they go on a recreational airplane trip I might as well be fueling up that jet because I knew and I let them. I tried pleading and begging them not to but because I’m such a no-count loser they can’t hear it. They just hear it as crazy talk.

Texts • Psychology

The Quick Primer for Old School Gaming was a huge influence on me when I first started playing blorbily but looking at the 2024 edition of that primer now I can see how far we’ve drifted apart.

Sure, someone overhearing our tables wouldn’t hear a difference. The “moose head example” would sound the same. Players describe how they are looking for treasures and traps rather than rolling for it.

I call that style of play “diegetic mechanics” and for me it definitively came from the old school primer. It’s so awesome. I definitely handle as much of the game as I can that way.

But the difference is the “improvisational” part. “Rulings, not rules.” The primer has an example of a DM deciding on the fly that a particular rogue has a 1d6 chance of finding traps (in addition to pouring water and knocking with poles I guess).

That isn’t my jam. If there is something behind the moose head it’s because it’s written down. Not because “oh the players are messing around with a moose head, I want to reward that and making up a secret compartment behind it”. Playing that way would not be blorb.

When I say “rules, not rulings”, new DMs, please do not be scared!

By all means, start small and with a simple ruleset! I want new DMs to take up the shield and go for it and not be overwhelmed by having to read a thousand books! But when you make a “ruling”, write it down and make it a rule instead. You can polish and revise it between sessions if you want and consult your players too, knowing it’s goose&gander and things you let them do, monsters might be able to do too.

Creating new mechanics and new rules is an amazing way to keep a blorb alive, a blorb that’s bigger than what you could manually track or create. We made the “looking for stuff outdoors” rules when it became impossible to in detail prep every single flower in every single square foot. But when doing so, I want to be guided by the blorb principles. No fair picking paper after seeing them choose rock, and no tier three truths if I have a tier two truth and no tier two truths if I have a tier one truth.

Texts • Rpg

Yeah, yeah, you can do it normally and just figure out that fifteen minus seven is eight. But you can also take the tens-complement to seven (which is three) and add that to the last digit which is five and that makes eight. It works for all single-digit numbers subtracted from a number 10–19. When you’re subtracting from an even bigger number, it’s not great (subtract ten rather than just lop off the first digit. So 123 minus 7 is absolutely not 6, it’s 116).

Maybe this is just a me-problem it’s just my weird brain (because I was out of school in second grade and missed out on subtraction drills) but I hate subtraction. It’s easier if I convert it to 7+X = 15, my brain right away returns with “eight” when seeing 7+X = 15 whereas when it sees 15 - 7 it returns with grumbling and rusty creaking and paaainful struggle of “okay first subtract the fives so we have two below ten that is eight” or I dunno what the heck it’s doing back there but it’s not fun for it (🧠) to do. But if I’m gonna juggle the numbers to turn it to 7+X = 15 anyway I might as well juggle them to be 3+5 instead because that’s even easier.

Why do I need a trick to subtract numbers in this range?

I’ve talked about this before but in D&D you often have to add the same static number over and over again to freshly rolled numbers off a twenty-sided die and then compare it to another static number. Let’s say you’re fighting a giant crab with AC 15 and you have a dinky li’l weapon that lets you attack with +7 on your twenty sided die rolls. You roll a 15. You add seven. That is 22. You hit. Then you roll six. You add seven. That is 13. You missed. Then you roll seven. You add seven. That is 14. You missed.

Compared to if you could just know that all rolls eight or higher are hits; you roll 15, that’s a hit. You roll six, that’s a miss. You roll seven, that’s another miss. That’s three additions you didn’t even have to make. That means the math is undeniably easier. There’s a whole step that’s elided!

Even if it’s just on a single roll I do like it when all the math is pre-figured and the roll immediately tells you the hit. You are fighting an AC 13 skeleton with that +7 attack.

Scenario one

You roll. The die hits the table. It’s a six. You add six to seven. You see that you hit.

Scenario two

You subtract seven from 13 so you know you need six or higher. You roll. The die hits the table. It’s a six!! Hooray! Immediate cheers and satisfaction! The hit is as immediate as the thunk of the dice stopping on the table.

In the early years of game design where fiddly li’l things like dice protocols were all we cared about partly because systems weren’t open source back then so everyone had to reinvent the wheel and partly because we hadn’t looked up to see the larger structural issues around prep and role GM/player role separation, this was call “fortune at the end”. Some hated it because they want to keep on fiddling with the dice for all time so it doesn’t see so random what’s happening. You might have rolled the six but then you add your skill of seven afterwards so that it’s your own skill that pushed it over the edge. (And the Fortune-at-the-end haters love it even more when there’s a resource like the compost in Three Sisters or the aspects in Fate that lets you actually change the results.) But I love fortune at the end and am always advocating for it. First place your bets, find your footing, notch your bow, lift your sword, and then let it fall.

House rules no more

Over the years I’ve tried encapsulating this in house rules. Back in 2014 for that first few months of D&D I made a box of SRD monsters on A7-sized cards where their attack values were pre-calculated to be tens complement so a skeleton’s +4 scimitar was listed as 6 and I had noted all the player character’s AC minus ten. So if ten skeletons attacked a character I could just look at that character’s noted number, add six, and grab ten 20s and roll them and quickly pick up the hits. That was all on the DM side and the players didn’t have to worry, for them it was the good old 3e system working as per ushe. This was only for a few years before we introduced “defense rolls” and those were normal D20+adds.

For our last campaign this spring I tried pushing the Suldokar’s Wake-style rules on them instead. As in, if you have a +7 sword attack vs an AC 15 crab, you hit on 7 or lower or 15 or higher. Exact same amount of hits and misses (out of the twenty sides, there are thirteen hits and seven misses) but it’s not the exact same specific ordinal numbers that hit. I.e. a natural 13 is a hit with D20+adds but a miss in the “roll extremes” system. That was mega confusing to the players and they hated it.

So I’m gonna bring back D20 + adds. Vanilla same-​as-​every-​other-​5e-​table D20 system. I know, I know, the players have pledged in the past to subtract before they start rolling but they never do. Subjective time is one part of this, but maybe there is some other appeal for them in adding after the roll and I’m the outlier. Whatever. That’s fine. I guess the main takeaway here for me is to let the players do their job whatever way they want to do it, and their job is to hit or miss. I don’t want to micromanage that. DMs don’t know what players want.

Texts • Rpg

There’s generally this theme I hear whenever I talk to other DMs online or in person, and I get frustrated with my fellow DMs for not understanding this: the kinds of games DMs love are not the same players love. Not every DM, but some forever DMs are all about super minimal games and they really love constraining the players and taking options away from them. My players love crunch and options. Classes to pick from and build out and test. I hate that and prefer way more open-ended and creative games like Fate or OSR where there’s only a few options that you can flavor as you wish. I love the blank canvas, they want the menu of options. DMs love minimal games because there’s less rules for them to have to remember and fiddle with and adjudicate and they can just concentrate on the prep. But there are many things that bring a player to the table. For some the game system in and of itself is the appeal. Getting to pick some actual abilities with actual crunch and tangible in-game effects is like Christmas for them.

A mindset I don’t have to share in order to understand and try to provide for. My own brain was messed up by the chasm width problem early on so I could never really care about these player abilities knowing that the DMs were likely holding the finger on the scale the entire time. (As in, what good is a +2 to picking locks when the DM could just make all locks be two harder.) But then the blorb principles solved the chasm width problem so now all of this crunch is actually real and there’s something pretty nifty about that.

Texts • Rpg

Sometimes the advice for cubelets is to stick to three or four archetypes but here’s a template for a full ten-archetype cubelet.

Put in twenty “mega-glue” cards that are each good in exactly four archetypes each (for example five per color and the card should be good in all four archetypes of that color and not good for other archetypes).

Then for each of the 45 possible pairs-of-two-archetypes, put in one card that’s only good for either of those two archetypes and bad in the eight other archetypes.

Then finally for each archetype put in three cards (maybe signpost uncommons) that are only good in that particular archetype.

That makes it so every archetype gets 20 cards (three that only it wants, nine that one other archetype wants, and eight that four other archetypes want). We’ve figuratively fit 200 cards in a 95 card deck.

Now here’s the trick. You get to scry 1 three times before you draw your card for the turn. (It’s scry 1 thrice instead of scry 3 so you can’t know what your opponent is gonna draw. But to speed it up you can place the cards on top of each other as you reject them and then place the deck on top of them instead of strictly putting each new rejected card under the previous one.) That means there’s a 61% chance of drawing a card relevant to any one architecture you want (and much, much higher if you’re building a board that combines two or more archetypes).

Now, since in a normal cubelet you have plentiful access to five-color lands, you can’t just rely on color to gatekeep it so that each “mega-glue” cards are “only” useful in exactly four of the ten archetypes. Maybe you could if you changed the land rule but otherwise you’ll just have to be very careful selecting the mega-glue cards.

Entering half-baked territory

I had some ideas for how to change that land rule. First I was thinking that maybe a white card becomes a Dimir land and a Selesnya card becomes a Grixis land or I dunno. Cards can make the mana they aren’t (five-color lands make colorless mana and colorless cards make any of the five colors). I thought it was gonna look ugly to leave the cards face up so first I thought maybe I’ll just discreetly scribble on the color wheel on the back of cards to indicate what the lands are. But then I didn’t wanna do that. Even if the cubelet is built out of draft chaff, in the apocalypse when there are no more card printers these cards are gonna matter to someone. So how about this? Each land also has the Meteor Crater ability, i.e. they can make colors you already have in play. That way you don’t need to peek as often underneath to remember what colors your lands have.

Or, maybe they are five-color lands but you can only have so-and-so many permanent colors in play and maybe some limit on non-permanent spells. (The following is a li’l too overwrought to be a refined final rule but just to think out loud: you can have permanents of up to two colors in play and cast instants/sorceries of up to three colors per turn but they count against each other so if you already do have two permanentcolors in play you can cast instants of those colors and up to one extra color per turn.) That way if your Rakdos board gets wiped you can switch gears and try to build up with Selesnya or Gruul. Season to taste (i.e. maybe allow the arcs or wedges in an arc or wedge set).

Texts • Mtg

For me GTD was lifesaving. More than once actually. I would be dead if I hadn’t found it. When I was getting into GTD, one of the things I liked to read for entertainment was productivity blogs. I realized that reading them wasn’t “doing” anything, it was just reading. I didn’t find it any less worthwhile and any more procrastinatey than reading comics or watching Breaking Bad. It was just clean good fun, with the added bonus that (rarely) there was the occasional actual good tip that I still use and rely on to this day that significantly increases my ease and quality of life. Every day is such a struggle and without those tips to make it a li’l easier it’d be way harder.

I saw that 43folders.com’s domain name was gone and the site was down. I just wanted to say thanks. It was a site I loved.

Texts • Gtd

I just realized that I’ve been pretty reckless and unempathetic as I advocate for handwriting and paper. I have “stenography privilege” since I can write shorthand. That’s as fast as typing. Most people’s longhand is like ten times slower than a good typist. It’s not fair or practical to just tell them to go paper-based. Maybe you can go paper for one day just to get an overview of the workflow and then bring it back to digital if you want.

I do use cursive longhand in the meta-grimoire but that’s just when creating new topics. Most of the time all I’m adding is reference numbers.

Texts • Gtd

Lately I’ve been using the +”%y-%V” date format a lot and I wanted a weekday format to optionally append to that (although most of the time the weekly granularity is enough) and landed on MTWRFSU for odd weeks and mtfwrsu for even weeks. I found online that some schools and hospitals use that system for scheduling. It’s good to have biweekly because then I don’t have to dedicate an entire page every week for my todo lists. That reminded me of the Arvelie calendar.

So in the back of a Techō Weeks there’s this “365 Days Check-Off Sheet” that always look like this (even on leap years, which is a bit awkward):

You can use it as an Arvelie calendar converter by adding some letters down one margin and the week numbers down the other.

I went with uppercase MTWRFSU for odd weeks and lowercase mtwrfsu of even weeks. Then I used the ISO week number that corresponds to the entire week being fully contained on that line. So for 2026 that means fields are labeled “RFSUmtwrfsuMTW” across and the weeks are numbered going 2, 4, 6, 8 etc down. The “ABCD etc” vertical lettering is the same every year since the Arvelie calendar doesn’t change year over year, but the weekday label and week number does change. (I looked it up with the help of the monthly spreads at the start of the book. For example in 2027 the first Monday in week 1 starts with January fourth. In 2026, the first full week is week 2 which starts with a lowercase m on January fifth.) For 2027, the fields are labeled “fsuMTWRFSUmtwr” across and the week numbers down go 1, 3, 5 etc. Like this:

How to find Arvelie date from Gregorian

Looking in the calendar on the monthly or weekly spreads you can find your week and the day of that week and that way find your day of the year in the grid. (Bonus if you also wanted to find out the day of the year, like I’m writing this day 268 of 2026 apparently.) Then you can find the Arvelie month letter on that row and to get the date you just count the offsets on the day on that row. (The first row already has 1 through 14 printed but remember that Arevelie is 0–13 so subtract one if you’re looking up there.)

For example let’s say we’re gonna convert April 1st 2027. That is Thursday week 13, an odd week so uppercase T. So find the number crossreferencing T and 13, it’s 91. That number row has G and is the sixth offset from the left so it’s Arvelie G06. Or let’s take an even-week date like April fifth. Looking at the date in the monthly or weekly spreads we see that that is Monday week 14. It’s the nearest lowercase m following week 13 so it’s 95. That is Arvelie date G10. (I don’t really use the 91 number or the 95 number, the position of the number is all that matters, I just noted those here in case you’re following along.)

How to find Gregorian date from Arvelie

Find the row corresponding to the Arvelie month, find the weekday and week number by looking at the other letterals corresponding to that number. Then look that day up in the monthly or weekly spreads. For example Arevlie day J11 in the Gregorian year 2027 is 138, and that is the lower case t on the 19 line so it’s Tuesday week 20, which the monthly or weekly spread tells us is the merry merry month of May 18th. Again the number 138 isn’t used in the calculation, it’s just my way to “point to” the right box for anyone following along at home.

You can still use it as a check-off sheet

But every day becomes mapped to one particular date instead of any 365 days starting on any day, so that’s the trade-off here. You lose some flexibility but gain being able to look up what day particular number belongs to and you can find day of year and, by looking at the alphabet rows, you can find the Arvelie grid.

This doesn’t have to be part of “setting up a new Techō”; since all the info you need to do it is in the book (it’s a calendar, after all) you can do it whenever you want to, for fun, just as long as you brought a pen.

Texts • Gtd • Rymden

Yes, there is a tension between how in minimalism we want less physical stuff whereas how among smartphone haters we have this tendency to accrue a bunch of single-use items.

A minimalist might ask “why should I need a shelf full of paper books, a computer, a game console, a radio, an anything when I can just do all that on one single glowing rectangle?”

I think that’s a great point!

The problem is that for some of us that world of constant online became just so toxic that we couldn’t handle it. Both on a personal level and on a societal level. On the society level it’s like The World of Ideas and Dreams have been increasingly claimstaked and proprietarized and vendorized. Appified. People aren’t on networks anymore, they are on specific web forums owned by gigacorporations. I don’t want that.

On a personal level it’s just not fun anymore. I really treasure being able to walk away from the internet. Sickenly enough the city I live in and love is destroying that by putting up video ads on huge screens IRL, outside and indoors. It’s like how a swiss army knife seems like a good idea until you realize you might want to be able to bring a compass or a pair of tweezers or whatever to a lot of places where knives can’t go.

Our perception as smartphone haters is that our current paradigm for a multitasking device is fundamentally broken both on a physical level (overly glowy screen, lack of tactical buttons, fiddly and clumsy), on a phychological level (addictive dark patterns and timesinks), and on a corporate-ownership level. Your smartphone isn’t really yours, nor does it belong your community. It’s on loan from Apple/Google. They can shut it down.

Since we have that view of smartphones, there’s no wonder that we want to get away from it even when the current best way to get away from it might seem stupid with all this junk.

I get how a lot of this comes across just neurotic craziness on the part of me and my smartphone-hating peers. Nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia as a refuge, as a delulu response to the future-shock of the world of today.

I admit that I’m diving deep into looking backwards in search of comfort. It’s also a way to try to step “sideways” for new ideas on how we can get out of this mess we’re in. Lately I’ve been getting into reading older science fiction (or books like A Pattern Language), and writing from a perspective of what could we have instead of smartphones. How can we keep in touch with the people we know IRL, how can we find our way through a bustling city, and how can we learn things? And what is the best way for us to dream and fantasize in a way that supports our creativity rather than quashes it? How can we face reality in a way that lets us help foster a better tomorrow without drowning us in a poison soma of comforting fake distractions?

Now, it’s a lived reality for some people… for very few people, that the smartphone is a great tool for them. They don’t have any WhatsApp or Facebook or other proprietary hellscapes. They can turn it off and put it away when they have a friend or family member around and bring it out when it’s time to do meaningful things like catching up with correspondence or looking things up or reading. They have a screen that their eyes can handle. They have a way of entering text that’s fast and efficient. I mean… good for them, but that’s not most people.

Texts • Aesthetics

Oh wait I just realized that it’s the 20th anniversary (approximately) since I got on GTD!

Over the past 20 years, two short-cuts have snuck into my practice that are both big no-no’s in GTD even though they save a lot of time.

One is that I often bypass my inbox and all that processing and instead write things directly where they are meant to go. Calendar items get scheduled directly, todo-times get written on their right context and with a project on my projects page if they’re multi-step.

The other is that I often skimp on the weekly review, just quickly read through things instead of carefully spend a lot of time on each times. I usually don’t teach the review right away either. I know from my own experience with my own pre-GTD self that some people are just so messed up that just going from nowhere to having a list of goals and their next actions is a life-saving win on its own and it’s well worth to just start with that.

These shortcuts are well and good but taken together they really exacerbate each other’s downsides. Cruft gets on there that really aren’t the best thing to spend my time on (or to spend procrastination-guilt on). I get nerdsniped and overly SOFA. I can see why these shortcuts are considered so taboo in GTD. “If you’re not doing a review, you’re not doing GTD”.

GTD didn’t keep the “four quadrants” from Covey where things can be urgent and important separately and we need to take time from urgent non-important things to do important non-urgent things. It doesn’t do all that fiddly prioritizing stuff. (I guess GTD guilty of its own “shortcuts” too.)

So while I’m probably gonna keep the “skip inbox” shortcut for the forseeable, I’ve been spending a lot more time on my weekly reviews for the past few months and that has been a lot better. And by “a lot more time”, it’s still what under fifteen minutes or so? It’s time well spent and it’s enjoyable, valuable time. It only seems like a lot compared to the like half a minute or so I was down to.

Texts • Gtd

I moved my GTD system back to paper in the fall of 2023 and a few weeks ago I started using very thick A5-sized notebook as an index into all my other paper notebooks and calendars (and there are some references to digital files and folders in there too).

The entire notebook is divided alphabetically, I divided it up before I started writing. Each letter kluster has several pages, for example “Ka–Kd” has 8 pages, 248 rows total. (Some entries fit several to a row, other entries take up multiple rows.) If that space runs out I can put in a pointer to an entry with more room. The idea is that this one thicc book is gonna last for the rest of my life. I went with this (inspired by the paper address books I grew up with in the 80s) instead of a more dynamic “Locke-style commonplace index” because I wanted something more robust and direct for this. I can use locke-indexes in other books (so some notebooks have their own indices in addition to the meta-grimoire) or bujo-type toc-indexes or date-based or whatever fits that book’s own project.

The meta-grimoire isn’t for real info, it’s all pointers to other notebooks and calendar. That’s the meta part. I just write the name of the topic or person and then for example I write 26-38 in a rectangular box which means techō “weeks 2026, week 38”. That might be a phone number or an appointment time or reflections on a movie I saw and loved.

I only backfilled a few entries that I really don’t want to lose (and I might backfill more stuff later). It’s mostly forward-looking.

One of the limits I’m trying to remember when writing in the meta-grimiore is that these are reference notes, not action notes. As in, these are notes I might or mightn’t want to look up later, but the notes are never of the type or urgency that need to pop up and “find” me the way a reminder or calendar item or todo item is designed to do. My list of things I need to do and remember and get to and boxes I need to check, that’s all in in the techō, not in the meta-grimiore.

The secondary benefit is that knowing that I can find things makes me less hesitant to write them. It’s not going to be “lost”, I can find it if I really want to (even though it’s a two-step process of finding the meta-grimoire and looking up what notebook to then really look it up in).

The main benefit is that every Sunday when I update the index I get to look at my past week and think about everything again. The extra friction is a way to make sure I look at all that happened and that is pleasant or motivating or I dunno what. I want to keep doing it because it’s been great these past weeks.

The index doesn’t go in my bag, not normally. It lives on my shelf at home and I update it week. If I need to stay away from home for a few weeks, that’s fine. I’ll just update the index when I get home.

Do I, a lapsed computer nerd, really believe something like this has actual advantages over having a digital index or an app like org-mode or logseq? That’s not what I’m saying. (For example the backup situation is non-existent, and the pointer system makes it more fragile rather than more redundant. Although I’ve lost digital indexes in the past, too.) I didn’t go paper for any real reasons, I did it out of nostalgia and coziness and mood and aesthetic. It’s like when I got the old phone one year ago, I get how when looked at it “rationally” it comes across as just a meaningless and pretentious LARP but then in practice it ends up being something I really enjoy, treasure, and want to keep doing. Come for the aesthetic, stay for the wellbeing. I learn that it was the right decision even though I don’t necessarily understand why or how it was the right decision. Maybe that’s just a benefit of all aesthetics: it sparks joy because it is something chosen or thought-through or something invested in.

For the past three summers I have had a project to reevaluate whether to go back to digital. This summer I decided to really double down on paper and that’s when I created this. The exact format for how I write my next actions and projects and other GTD stuff might still change but I’m really enjoying having gone to paper.

Texts • Gtd

The work-first principle (“arbetslinjen”) was instituted for pretty good reason: a welfare state requires a high rate of employment to fund itself.

But in the name of the work-first principle and “austerity”, that higher goal is constantly being undermined both on a primary and secondary level.

On a primary level the welfare state itself being dismantled and destroyed. The entire justification for to the work-first principle was to preserve and treasure and care for the welfore state. That “to each according to need” would be funded by “from each according to ability”. When the work-first principle becomes a means to destroy that welfare state we’ve all been made fools.

On a secondary level the goal of a high rate of employment, even that goal is being undermined. Help is being replaced by requirements. The public sector (our biggest employer and the reason this land survived the 2008 financial crash) is being gutted and looted. Employment rates are plummeting.

Let alone meaningful employment, spending time and labor and resources on things that actually make the world better. We are drowning in meaningless and distracting and ugly ads to buy buy buy while the world is burning and is the hottest it has been in 125000 years.

What’s really going on is this: It’s been the goal of the rich-gets-richer party for hundreds of years to keep the breadline long, cold, and uncomfortable. That is great for them because that means buying labor (“employing workers”) is a buyer’s market where you get the pick of the litter and can keep prices (“salaries”) down, and, the workers that you do have employed are less likely to organize or have demands. Being unemployed is deliberately designed to sting while at the same time as many people as possible are being kept unemployed.

That means that the lived experience for many people is meaningless drudgery. They suffer with meaningless WFTSOW so that the labor that actually is being extracted and exploited for the gainful profit of the owners is cheaper and more compliant.

Texts • Politics

With a patronizing scoff of pity I looked at a tyrannical app in another land. It was a “Super App” called WeChat or KakaoTalk or LINE or Grab or Gojek. Every human being in that land needed the app. You needed it for transportation, for buying things, for identification, everyone had to have it.

Why didn’t the government intervene and stop that monopoly? Because in some ways the app was beneficial for bad-faith actors in that government. They could more easily monitor and control their population thanks to that app.

It was with relief I looked up and saw that I was here in the good old home where we are not beholden to the “Super App”. But the relief turned to a feeling of crushed ice in my exhale as I thought about it for three seconds longer and realized with fear that we do labor under a super app to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

That app has two names. Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Texts • Politics

It feels weird that I never read Michael Ende’s Momo until now since it feels like I’ve lived my life as if it had made a deep impressions on me early on. And lately it feels that way more than ever.

There is a scene when Momo returns to the town after a year and a day and the Grey Gentlemen have trapped everyone. That’s how 2026 feels to me. Suddenly everyone around me is trapped in Screenland and I can’t reach them. I needed to read this book now and I’m grateful to it even though it’s painful. It’s sublimation, it’s validation, it’s hope. It’s “Somebody out there gets it”.

So if you see me criticizing the book below, that’s me trying to shake some of the dust off a masterpiece. I think Momo is an awesome book.

Michael Ende studied Zen and this book seems like his attempt to teach his particular dharma, but for me it feels like only half the picture. This book has a strong focus on the one-step-at-a-time. Remember the movie Don’t look up? The point of that movie was to actually do look up and do see the big story so we can do something about it. That perspective is missing in Momo.

In Momo the villains use handwritten notebooks and transistor radios. The heroes sweep the streets one stroke at a time and tell stories without writing them down or ever telling them again. (Not sure how literally to take that given how Michael Ende himself was an author and actually did write down and publish his stories.)

Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night: the first one’s named Screenland. The corporate fake Internet-in-name-only that is addictive and intoxicating. For that, Momo is the right book. Everything in it just rings ten thousand times truer than it ever did now for a smartphone-hating luddite like me. The Grey Gentlemen and their time-saving time-wasting scheme is just such a perfect metaphor. It’s too close to even be a metaphor, it just literally is the same thing.

The second one is Climate Change, and doomsday’s on my trail. And for that, this book is not a good fit. The greenhouse effect is unlike any other problem humanity has ever had to deal with, so maybe it’s not to strange that a book that’s a restorative balm for how we human beings can comfortably interact and live has counter-productive advice when it comes to a problem that requires zooming out and looking up; seeing the whole forest just not the one tree we’re tending. Yes, degrowth and Bookchin-style dialectical naturalism and municipalism is one way to build a good life without exacerbating climate change but I believe we need something beyond that in order to stop that. If the next village over has an oil pump they can still wreck the earth no matter how much we don’t contribute to the earth-wrecking in our li’l Odonian Paradise village.

It’s also not a true depiction of monastic zen. Instead, at least in Antai-ji, they sweep the floor quickly. Every day they do it, but they do it quickly. Monastery life doesn’t need GTD because they have a schedule for every hour of every day of every year. It’s ora et labora. That’s what I meant by “half the picture”.

One of my meditation teachers taught me how one model for the thousands of strands of human thoughts, emotions, impulses and sensations is to roughly divide them into three categories. This is just an oversimplified model so don’t get it twisted; the map isn’t the territory. Those three categories are primary sensation, simulated experience, and reflexive awareness. In the book, Beppo represents primary sensation, Guido represents simulated experience, and Momo represents reflexive awareness. A couple of different meditation techniques use focusing on primary sensation as a way to strengthen reflexive awareness. As in, we think of one sensation at a time (like our posture, or our brush as we sweep the street) and when we find that we’re thinking of something else we bring it back, and that “catching ourselves” is the practice and is what strengthens reflexive awareness, is the idea.

So when Ende is extolling primary sensation and one-stroke-at-a-time, that’s not necessarily him being reductionist and “not looking up”; that’s a tool for polishing the mirror. In the end, we learn Beppo alone can’t defeat the Grey Gentlemen. So I’m not at all saying that Ende was trying to push his half-the-picture as if it were the whole picture.

The actual deus ex machina ending is a major copout. Seeing the denoument after is great, hopeful, yes, we can win, planewide celebration, hip hip hooray, loved it, best part of the book, but… Just before that, the actual way Momo wins is heartbreaking because it’s not real. The first part of the book does such a great job setting up how Beppo can experience (and convey through Right Speech), Guido can dream, and Momo can listen. Zen mind beginner mind. The ultimate Ligotti refutation. But then none of that works and instead here is some magic flowers, they did the work.

But. That’s fine. What matters is that this book shows that there are people who know and understand problem and can convey it beautifully and poetically and with hope. This book is priceless.

Sometimes I do feel like we can’t win against the fash and that if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. Other times I find a book like this and it lights a fire in my heart and the fire tells me to stay true and the name of that fire is Momo.

Texts • Recensioner

Restaurants, please don’t make halloumi, paneer, “grilloumi” or similar hard cheeses be your “vegetarian” option because they are almost twice as bad for the climate as even pork is (and pork is already super bad).

I know I come across as a killjoy nag on this doomposting blog but I don’t fault any one consumer for being taken in by this greenwashing. It’s presented as the green, the vegetarian, the vegetable-eating option but hard cheeses are not plants.

I can’t really fault the restaurants too much either since they in turn might’ve gotten taken in by suppliers.

Texts • Cooking

A family member yesterday who is going on an aoroplane vacation said “I know you don’t like that” and I was like… it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s not my opinion that matters. I actually think flying and travel is fun and fascinating. The problem is that millions of people have died from climate change already and many times more that is set to do so unless we change, and the single biggest thing most individuals can do (outside of voting, organizing, and rioting) is to fly less.

(Eating plants is pretty good too.)

Texts • Politics

Sometimes you still hear that society is polarized and we need to move towards the middle.

Pretty messed up considering how everything’s moved towards the right these past forty years, further than I ever would’ve imagined.

• Increased corruption
• Increased wealth gaps
• Persecution of minorities
• Genocides plural
• Backsliding of women’s rights (and against the radical idea that women are people)
• Privatization of what was publicly owned
• Dismissal of any representation as “woke pandering”
• Reckless exploitation of transaction externalities
• Climate delayism and increasingly outright denialism even as climate change has killed millions
• An internet that has gone from owned by everyone to being walled off by Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta (and their profits off that making them the most powerful entities in Earth’s history)
• A scrip system that’s chewing up the planet on an unprecedented scale through “proof of work”
• Runaway technological unemployment and concentration of resource ownership

It’s not “polarizing” to want to stand against that.

It’s pretty sickening to see the left following the right wing’s puppy tail towards the bottom of the abyss, “chasing the center voters”. Chasing yesterday’s shadow and tomorrow’s grave.

Texts • Politics

Okay, with this variant you win when the opponent can’t make a move on the board and is out of reserve pieces, just like the original 1960s game, but you only have six moves to win!

Take six pieces each of an unused player color (if your version doesn’t have extra color pieces you can use dice or beads) and place them beside you and everytime you make a move, you lose one, and when you’re all out, you lose the game!

But don’t worry, you get them all back (i.e. you reset back up to six) everytime you make one or both of the following:

1. Change the number of pieces that are captured or in reserve
2. Move one or more pieces (that are already on the board) on top of a stack that’s controlled by your opponent

Each player’s moves are tracked and reset separately; stalling only hurts yourself and not the opponent.

You get six because often these “stalling” moves are great setup moves for future attacks!

Asymmetric variant

If you believe like Sackson did that the second player has an advantage in Focus, here’s a variant to balance the scales: only have the second player have these move counters. The first player can take their time, but they still won’t be deliberately stalling out the other player.

That also fixes the problem where if neither player wants to make a move the player who just happened to have the most move counters left then will win. Maybe it’s good that it works that way but I’m not sure.

Maybe you can also still stall by placing pieces on the board (temporarily changing your reserve count so you can reset) in a way that you can still get them back. I’m not sure. Eggheads, get cracking with your analyses!︎♥︎

Texts • Boardgames

Okay so I went on this rabbithole of anti-smartphone stuff online (don’t worry, my goody-two-shoes writing-things-down-on-paper self said that I could) and one thing that came up a few times was the whole “phones and social media are actually super necessary and it’s classist and clueless and frankly cruel to say you can just quit that so I’m not gonna quit because that’s impossible, counterproductive, dumb, wrong and elitist” angle. And I get that. (Arguably why did you then make a video about quitting the internet but I get that too.)

Because please, let me zoom out and reframe this issue a bit. Let’s look at the forest and not just this one tree.

Algo silo media with vendor lock-in is wrong and evil. (I’ve said why a hundred times but overshortified: they proprietarized our communal infrastructure and exploited it for huge wealth gaps.) But it’s the corporations (and the politians that kept them legal) that did wrong, not you the user.

Yeah, yeah, at some point one would’ve hoped that people would think for three seconds before signing up to the latest vendor-lock-in algo silo death trap, before it became a critical mass, but once it did become a critical mass I can’t blame any one single user when their friends, housing, job, and family depended on them being on Facebook/​LINE/​WhatsApp/WhateverTheHeck. I know such dependencies are possible. I have lost housing opportunities, jobs, friends (entire friend groups and even boyfriends) when I had a weird overly-stubborn, mentally-locked brain who refused to go on these silo sites even as that refusal was killing me. (I mean, going on the silo sites would’ve also killed me so it was lose/lose. Join the other lemmings and die from falling off the cliff or don’t join them and die of loneliness.)

I can’t expect or demand anyone else be a weirdo like me and become an offline pariah. That’s not what this is about.

Here’s an analogy: we can look back at the early years of the industrial revolution hundreds of years ago without faulting any one worker for choosing to get torn to shreds on the factory floor over starving herself and her entire family to literal actual factual death by hunger. While we also recognize that as a whole, the system that victimized those workers was bad for them and for the environment and set up generational wealth gaps we’re still reeling from today almost three hundred years later, and we can blame the titans of industry and the politicians that enabled them.

Not everyone can break free. Not everyone who has managed to break free can stay free. (And being able to is a huge privilege that those who manage to do it hopefully do not take for granted.)

We can know that and still say phone is bad.

And, we can keep trying to fight it in any way we can, big or small, together or alone, wholly or partially. If you can’t do that (especially alone), that’s 100% legit. That doesn’t mean the suddenly-gigantic-because-they-fooled-us-all tech corporations are anywhere close to acceptable ethically as they vendorize all human communication, and speaking out against them and their gilded cages is meant as a slag on them, not on their victims.

Sometimes there’s this narrative that “whoops, we humans collectively as a whole when we created all this wonderful and useful information technology, we all together accidentally made a teeny tiny subset of all this wonder have very slight detrimental psychological and physiological effects. But don’t worry, here’s how you can scroll 1% more responsibly in order to keep being a good productive citizen.”

Sometimes I’m complicit in that narrative because it’s such a pervasive narrative. Like the proverbial fish not seeing the proverbial water.

Water in this case being how specific people deliberately proprietarized, vendorized, silofied, and then algoritmified and enheckified our communication protocols in order to make mega bucks. People decided to do that and then did that and that was evil and has created an evil system.

Do not misread this as the just-as-wrong opposite narrative that just says “Oh, Facebook and X just coincidentally happens to have evil people on their respective thrones. If good guys ran those corporations they’d be useful and great for all.”

Naw part one because proprietary silo sites are inherently a societal evil and there’s no “good” way to run one, and naw part two because while evil people did these things, they became evil, and they became thrust upon the evil throne of bone and skulls, as an emergent consequece of an economy system; the “rules” of the “game” we humans are all “playing” more or less inevitably have this outcome and the only way out of is is to change the rules.

And I’m not saying neo-ludditism (or its defanged, scalarly misnomered, watered-down, middle-class-and-tame version “digital minimalism”) is the only solulu. What y’all are doing on email, XMPP, IRC and Fedi (i.e. trying to build and find tools that are owned by everyone-and-no-one, and that benefit human communication and progress instead of exploit it) is another legit approach.

Many moons ago, when our ancestors in the FSF and the SPI correctly foresaw that proprietary software was an evil that would fuel a neocolonialist, planet-eating dystopia, they didn’t just shred their drives in disgust. They got out their keyboards and started hacking.

Texts • Politics

Lots to love in this book. Plenty of bad things too.

I might or I mightn’t read more books from this guy. Reading over his bibliography, he sure has a lot of interesting pitches that makes me really curious.

The main story here, I liked. It’s an adventure story that does feel like an adventure story but also has a somber, heartbreaking Tove Jansson vibe.

But just like some of her books (looking at Sun City for example) he doesn’t use quotation marks nor dialogue dashes. People just say things and it’s not offset in anyway That gets annoying real fast. I first heard of this guy maybe twenty years ago and how he hates quotation marks, how he replaces a lot of commas with “and” and how he likes to run sentences together also with “and”. “Oh, that’s interesting”, I thought, “I’d like to read one of his books and see whether I’d like that style.” Now I have and now I know I don’t. I did enjoy the read but I would’ve liked it much more if it was just formatted normally.

There’s also “dont”, “wont” and “wouldnt” in lieu of “don’t”, “won’t” and “wouldn’t”. (But thankfully we at least get “I’ll” and “you’re”.) Worst of all, “‘ve” is consistently spelled “of”. “He would of written this sentence like this”. Mostly that’s in dialogue (and one more educated character makes sure to say ‘would have’) and I guess the point a lot of the characters probably would’ve spelt it that away themselves, but, as someone who normally hates eye dialect since it comes across as so patronizing, this is one step beyond that in the worse direction since it’s not even something they’re saying differently, it’s just his imagination that these folks are probably the type of people who spells “‘ve” like “of”.

There’s a lot of spots where it’s just hard to understand what happens.

I’m going to get into spoilers now so just go read the book yourself if you’re interested.

Early on, two guys sneak off into Mexico and I’m like “okay did they rob someone?” and they soon start kidding around about how they robbed a bank. But really, they didn’t. They’re just kids looking for a new life. The understated show-don’t-tell story-telling (reads more like a movie script than a novel) and weird formatting makes that hard to grok at first and there are plenty more situations down the road that have the same problem. So I guess this book is a valuable experiment that proves that overly showing and never telling isn’t all good. Now y’all know I ain’t the sharpest tool in the proverbial, and with that comes how sometimes I have a hard time following movies that are overly visual and they never explain with words what’s going on. This book has a lot of that same frustration for me.

There’s also a reckless bull-in-porcelain-shop approach here, but that’s a mix bag of bad and good. Guy glorifies bovine agriculture and oil rig work and that passes without comment, which sucks for a 1993 book (set in 1943). But the guy also seemingly glorifies coming in like some sorta white savior who is gonna show the Mexicans how to handle horses and he courts a girl in a way that kind of wrecks her life. In both cases the narration seems to go along at first but ends up pushing back.

The main story here is great. Like most books I’ve read lately I like the first part the best; here I like the first half the best. Two boys sneak off into Mexico and meet a third boy on the way and their lives get changed. There’s plenty of awesome locations and characters and lots of attention to detail on bags, clothes, guns and horses. I loved horse books growing up and this one goes into more detail than many of those did. Sometimes the detail is weird and makes no sense (using trot, which is the most exhausting way to ride, when you’re injured and two to a saddle? Uh okay) but most of the time there’s a lot of love there. This guy loves horses and that shines through.

The setting is also great. It’s 1943, World War is roaring, but it feels fully like an old west tale.

I mentioned on BookWyrm how I reread the 1980s kids book This Island Isn’t Big Enough for the Four of Us in conjuction with this. That one has no horses but two buys go camping on their own; just like John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins here they pack Kool-Aid. And that book was the first time I ever heard of huevos rancheros which they also eat in this book. Both have that same camping out under the stars vibe with plenty of focus on bags and gear. I dunno, the books just felt like mirror universe versions of each other. That one’s a light-hearted kids’ comedy, this one is a bloodsoaked tale of regret and rootlessness. I’m glad I got to alternate a lighter, brighter, safer book with this because that made this hit even harder.

I’m gonna end on a pretty low grade overall but what a mix of great and bad this book has and maybe I’ll revisit this grade if I read more books from McCarthy. But I’ll say this. I read plenty of hard-to-grade books where I find the overall structure awful while there are a couple of absolute gems in the sand. More rarely there’s the converse; the book as a whole is a gem but there are some poison pills snuck into the flaws. (For example there might be a book that’s overall awesome but marred by something like a cruel rape joke or a racist comment. [Also this is one reason why I hate writing reviews now: as the zeitgeist is moving on from the all-too-brief era of sensitively executed diverse representation, I realize how I come across as a pearl-clutching relic and I get self conscious over how I still want do books that actually care.])

What we have here is rarer still. This isn’t a mostly-shining gem with a few singular poison pills. It’s a gem worn down into dullness by grime and filth. The structure and plot as a whole is good and it’s built up masterfully off a great pitch. At one point near the end the main character retells the entire book to a couple of kids and he gets through the entire story in a third of a page and had this been a lesser book I would’ve said “aaargh you should’ve made this the entire book then” but here there’s no need. It’s a deserved flex because as a reader I loved all the detail and sense of getting to live through that story across a couple of hundred pages.

So that’s why it is a gem on the macro level. What I hate is what I’ve seen others praise about McCarthy and it makes me hesitate to press send on this dumb review. People love his prose style and his dialogue and I just don’t. Ear for dialogue? Maybe of the tin variety. The formatting is a suffocating wall-of-text, the clunky child-like grammar is a schlep to get through. I am hating on the exact thing that some people say is the best part.

Texts • Recensioner