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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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!︎♥︎

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.

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.

My war against Screen and against Online is over and this is the peace treaty: No screen without a matching TODO item.

I can spend any amount of time online or on devices or watching TV and do anything on there as long as I do this:

Away from the screen, with the screen off or out of view, I look at my “to do” list on paper, I look through the whole thing (things I want to do onscreen or IRL), and I write down things I want to do. I can then go to the screen, “enter Screenland” so to speak, and try to do as many things as possible on the “to do on screen” part of the list. No gimmicks, no app limits or blocks or guilt.

And then I can’t do anything else on screen that wasn’t part of the list. If my screen life prompts more screen life actions I can’t do them right away. I write them up on the paper (in a way I can tell it apart from the original “to do on screen” list I’m already working on) and then I can do them later after again leaving the screen and weighing them against everything else. If something mediumly urgent comes up I can write it down, pause all the other to-do-on-screen stuff, quickly close the screen and look at my lists. So far I haven’t had to do that. And if it’s a life-or-death real things are on actual fire then that would need an even bigger exception.

Everyday routines like “check messages” have a pre-printed daily allotment. Or that sounds way too fancy for what’s really going on in my case: I use a pen to draw circles in the corner of my calendar the day before how many times I am supposed to check messages the next day and then check those circles off as I use them up. It’s just a shorthand for “open mail app and RSS reader and respond to everything in there that I want to respond to”.

GTD fans, hark: there can no longer be any two minute rule for stuff in Screenland. I absolutely use that rule (which says that if you want to do something that takes less than two minutes, there’s no need to bring out the pen and paper lists for it, instead just do it) offline as much as possible, now more than ever, but the idea behind this peace treaty is that Screenland time is not allowed to beget more Screenland time. Within the context of “message replying time” I’ve alotted a little bit of time to do random undefined things as long as it’s both in direct service of each message, and it’s something I actually want to or have to do.

That “in direct service of” items on my “to do” list is a good mindset to cultivate. No longer do I have to feel any guilt for looking at a maps app or travel planning app in order to get to an IRL meeting. But this requires a judgment call. It’s easy to get nerd sniped into yak shaving for tangentially related minor connections to what you actually wanted to do.

I talked to a friend on the phone about this system and he was a bit incredulous. “Wait, did I get this right… You just have to look at your other lists, you don’t need to do anything on them? You can read that you’ve written ‘wash windows, make bed, sort books, prep food’, and then decide to not do anything of that and scribble in ‘watch cartoons’ and then go watch cartoons on screen?” Yes! Because this peace treaty is about doing what I want to do on screen as opposed to doing things I’m compelled to do, or that I do mindlessly.

I never said this peace treaty solved all life and productivity issues. It’s a life-long commitment, I don’t want to deprive myself of all rest and relaxation.

But my problem with Screen and Online hasn’t been that I’ve been doing anything bad on there. With a few exceptions, like when I’ve been a li’l addicted to chatbots (they are bad for the environment and bad for mental health), I’ve mostly been doing good and productive things online. Learning, being entertained, or talking to people. (Or even making programs, texts, images or other art.) The problem has been the compulsion. The lack of control. The runaway hours. The neglect of all other parts of my life.

This new approach is instead like serving up a big bowl of delicious food and then closing the door to the kitchen before eating it.

Notifications are now turned off by default all the time. I turn them on during “message reply time” and I can also, with the help of my pen and paper and looking at my other lists, decide to turn them on for specific time stretches. This is the inverse of my previous setup where notifications turned on every morning and I turned them off only when I wanted to really focus on work. Here, instead, they are off and I can turn them on when I want to be extra reachable. I haven’t been experimenting too much with this; so far I’ve kept them on for a few minutes during “message reply time” and one time I decided (not on a whim, I used the lists&paper method) that I’d have them on while watching a movie and then turn them off again when the movie only had fifteen minutes left. I didn’t end up getting any messages during the film and maybe that was lucky because maybe that was a dumb idea.

I’ve written before that being interrupted by messages while I’m doing something else isn’t all bad. Sometimes it has helped me get into what I’m doing because I can do it without fear of missing out. I was like “I’d rather hang out with friends than read comics but I don’t have to worry about that since if there’s a ping I won’t miss it while reading comics”.

But it’s not just the pings and buzzes. I’ve set it up so that when notifications are off, I can’t even see them. No badges, no pull down banners, no nothing while it’s in do-not-disturb mode. That’s the best part. Because say I’m playing a board game with a friend and we need to look up a rule. Now, I try to learn to just be like “it doesn’t matter what the official ruling is” but sometimes we do end up looking it up and in the past I might’ve seen a disturbing or upsetting message in the notification bar and I’ve been like “okay the rule is… Uh… Oh. Wow. Okay the rule is…” and then back to explaining the rule, trying my best to put the message out of mind for now even though it’s one that has stirred up a lot of sadness and worry. But now, I can just use the screen as a single-tasking, practical tool that doesn’t sidetrack me into anything else.

Because of how I now have notifications off most of the time, I’m grateful that I have a dumbphone as another way for fam to reach me. I quit smartphone in 2017 but it was a short-lived bliss since in 2020 I got addicted to using a tablet at home. It was better than the smartphone era since it was only at home but it wasn’t much better since I ended up being at home a lot. It wasn’t a happy, ignorant addiction; I was kicking and screaming against it the entire time.

That’s not to say that the dumb phone is entirely pain free; I use a Light Phone III and it’s surprisingly bad at setting notifications. You can block specific numbers or you can turn the entire sound on and off and that’s it. Through an supported hack (and I think I heard that the modding route I used has been turned off) I’ve set it up to mute automatically at night. But the first Fair Phone had a slider to let you airplane mode for up a few hours and then have it automatically turn on again (perfect for movies or hanging out with friends) and even my Nokia dumbphone had a way to only mute text messages while leaving calls on; it was hidden behind a menu dive but it could do it and I often used that and I miss that capability on the Light Phone, but the good part is having a way to get in touch without going online, like if someone’s late too meeting up or something.

I’m back on the wagon with GTD but this could work with almost any system even ones that are incompatible with GTD, like time boxing. But no fair making a long list of films and then being like “okay it’s on a TODO list so I can watch it”; Screenland is a hostile land and my idea of what I want to do needs to be specific to each particular visit there.

That has been the biggest mindset-shift here. I’ve gone from living in Screenland and making uncomfortable and unsettling expeditions into reality when I really had to eat or sleep, to living in reality and making perilous expeditions into the world of screens with a map drawn up before hand. (“Map” being a metaphor for the list written on paper.)

The terms of this “peace treaty” also means that I can do anything I want on screen for as long as I want with no guilt or anxiety. I’ve tried desperate measures in the past, like giving my iPad’s app limits password to a friend so I physically couldn’t use Safari longer than an hour a day. Then whenever I actually had to use Safari for work stuff or to pay bills or whatever it was a breathless, anxious affair. When I switched to using this Android tablet (because of it’s more comfortable screen—it doesn’t glow! At all! It needs a lamp or the sun in order for me to see the text) that wasn’t possible anymore because Android doesn’t do app limits. I mean it has the feature but it’s pointless since it’s like “Okay your fifteen minutes are up! Do you want to turn off the limit” and you can just turn off the limit and it’s not actually a limit. That’s why I needed to come up with this entire mindset shift instead of relying on software solutions.

I’m also trying to become comfortable with not looking up every li’l weird trivia question that comes into my head. When I’ve tried similar approaches in the past my “to do on web” list has quickly grown and I’ve just been adding overhead because to look up things like “how many squirrels are in Central Park”, instead of just a quick web search I’ve had to write it down on paper, then later look my paper list up and read it, and then after I’ve learned it I’ve had to mark it off, and it’s just a lot of steps and a lot of fiddliness for little value. So “embrace ignorance” was my motto for the first few days of this new approach. I’m trying to find a good balance there.

Now, how to actually stop myself from doing things that aren’t on the list? That is an unsolved problem! Send advice! So far I’ve been doing pretty good (I’m writing this first version of this essay after one week into this peace treaty), but maybe that’s a fluke and I’m gonna end up having to head back to the zafu. It helps that I know that I can do anything I want online just as long as I do it according to the terms of the peace treaty.

It helps even more that I’ve been feeling so curious about how I feel about being offline. That has not always been easy—it’s been like being kicked out of the matrix, lost my way out from the “world soul”.

Whenever I’ve traveled the past few years I’ve tried to not bring internet with me (partly for “digital detox” reasons but also because one of the points of traveling is to experience life differently than at home and if I see the same RSS feeds and the same day to day virtual locations then it’s not that much of a journey) and the worse I’ve been feeling lately about my screen addiction, the more I’ve dreaded returning home to internet. But with this new approach it feels like that all the time. That was painful at first, painful but interesting. Maybe this new “disconnectedness” feeling was the third and biggest benefit of turning off notifications.

So in practice there has been a lot less screentime. I’ve been reading paper novels, embroidering, and trying to hang out with friends.

I’m motivated by the idea that the world of screen is illusory. It doesn’t really quench my thirst for connection. It seems to, in the moment, but in the long run just stokes the flames. That’s not a slag on the friends I’ve made online. I’m still gonna keep on talking to you.♥︎ Probably not any less, either. Talking to friends isn’t exactly what I’d call “wasting time online”. It’s just that it’s going to be when we both really want to as opposed to compulsively or unhealthily.

Follow up, two weeks later

(Three weeks since start.)

I’ve had some more good days since and some bad.

It’s wild to me that the screen land is so addictive that even these terms of “you can do anything online for as long as you want as long as you, you know, actually decide to do it first” has sometimes been too much of a restriction for the proverbial monkey mind.

I guess that part of me suspected that if I took a step back and thought for two seconds, it wouldn’t wanna be online after all, and paradoxically it was scared of that decision. Scared of having to be responsible for being in Screenland, I guess.

Last few days I have been able to stick to the regime. I should hope so; the plan is that this is the deal now for the rest of my life. It’s not as neat of a bow as my internet-hating side would want but that’s why it’s a compromise. But I really jinxed myself last time I wrote about it. I thought I was done, brain finally fixed, I wanted to blog about my new approach right away but held off until I had “been good” for an entire week. And then the next day and the day after: just total screen junkie. 🤦🏻‍♀️

But it’s not about maintaining a streak. It’s that this is the roadmap I’ve committed to. If I lost my way from that road, well, road’s still here. Close eyes, put screen away, look at paper, that’s it. Or if in doubt also look at room, feel pulse, look at todo list, look at other fun things I want to do with my time and decide whether screen is what I actually want to do more than any of those things. And it’s okay if the answer is yes! Like today I was doing embroidery and I looked up how to sharpen a blunted Chenille needle. Good use of screen. I just have this weird “compulsive vowing” personality where I just wanna go purer and stricter and more all-or-nothing-preferably-nothing, in a quest for clarity. This peace treaty is a compromise against that. So in that sense I’m not happy with the peace treaty. I would’ve wanted “war against screen is over and here are the terms: no screens ever again”. This new approach seems like such a selling-out of that dream.

But my consolation is that it really does feel life changing. Even this weaksauce watered-down baby-version of offline-but-not-really feels watershed compared to being constantly connected.

And, the big conclulu is obv that actually living life IRL with real people is difficult and scary and not something I’m gonna learn to do in one day. And that’s the real goal and screens can help and hinder that goal. Reaching for paper and pen is step one in becoming more goal-oriented and less zombified.

When we talk about solving climate change (ration energy, leave the fossils in the ground, any DACCS and BioCCS should be funded directly instead of as an excuse to burn more fossils, fix market capitalism’s bugs or replace it outright, tax the rich, get money out of politics) what they hear is akin to as if we would’ve said “Oh, why do you need doors or windows? Just walk through the walls with ghost powers” or “Why do you need stairs? Just stride up the clouds”.

That is how deep their programming goes.

They’re living in a completely cart-before-horse world where the economy as it currently works today is seen as the prereq for any kind of changes. Even though it’s in reality the other way around; we can’t have an economy if there are no people because everyone died and starved and burned from climate change.

The truth is that big changes are possible and have been possible.

When my parents were little we had never been to the moon and here in Sweden we literally drove on the other side of the road. There was a huge traffic reform. And they lived through energy rationing. Actual here let’s divide up how much energy everyone gets to use because we actually realize there is an actual shortage.

When I was little music only came on records and tape and I lived through mp3, GNU, Debian, Wikipedia. And fridges and hairspray were eating up the ozone layer. And Berlin was split by a wall.

Even most of all y’all reading this has lived through the pandemic era when streets where empty once more.

Who are “they”?

I should’ve had some intro about how this is just such a common pattern when I try to talk about climate to almost anyone. It just happens again and again that the person I’m talking to, almost whoever they are, are like “that’s not possible because the economy” when in reality the economy is not going to be possible because climate change.

I want my anti-smartphone books to be red-hot and flaming Molotov cocktails thrown uncompromisingly at the algo silo surveillance mental ice age. 🔥🍾

I want The Interior Castle. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (and The Treasury of the Dharma Eye). Days of War, Nights of Love. A Pattern Language. Desolation Angels.

Books printed on pure dynamite that straight out scream how the growth treadmill to deadworld is lies and poison. Is illusion. Sickening treacle.

I don’t want no weaksauce “it’s unreasonable to have fewer than ninety Facebook friends”. I want to pipe Facebook and WhatsApp and Line and Instagram and all the rest to /dev/null/smithereens. Rumspringa is over. The soma is bitter. Time to get sober.

Screens aren’t the problem. Or screens aren’t the only problem. The gilded pittrap of dark pattern algo silo vendor lock-in Huis Clos is the problem. Books that fall short of condemning that whole broken infernal machine are better used as bricks thrown through the glass labyrinth.

I have three different devices with either Google Play or Apple Appstore.

I have three different devices with an NFC reader.

There is zero overlap between these two categories; i.e. I do not own one single device that has both appstore and NFC. (Beyond the six that have either, I have a couple of devices with neither.)

The Swedish police’s new electronic ID that’s about to launch requires both.

This is an empathy exercise, but don’t worry: you’re gonna get to hate someone along the way if you want to. Or if you love them, that’s okay too. The exercise doesn’t hinge on your hatred of them.

Okay, so bring to mind someone you really had a problem with in the past. A school bully or something. Let’s add some twists to that: now they have a lawn sign of your most opposite political party. And they step on kitten tails too. In short, a real jerk. I’m gonna call them “Jones” in the following story.

One morning a li’l earlier than you’d like, it’s before breakfast, before anything, there’s a ring on your door. You open groggily.

Outside are a bunch of police and they put you in the car. Not gently.

It takes a while until they let you know on what charges you’re arrested. Convicted, even. Actually it’s not even until you’re on the firing row that they’ll let you know your supposed crime:

Apparently, Jones (or the political leadership he voted in) killed someone overseas. And that country has an “for each one of us who dies, one of them needs to die” policy. And you won that lottery. Congratulations.

Now that story makes zero sense. It’s an absurd, bad, and awful story. Because the “for each of us who dies one of you needs to die” approach does not make sense.

And the war between Trump and Khameini makes no sense. Here we have leaders who only a small minority of the population in “their” respective country actually approve of, and they’re perpetually “retaliating” by killing “one of them”. Or “ten of them”.