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...

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...

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...

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...

A cubelet is a shared deck for Magic where you can play any card facedown as a land. 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...

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...

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...

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....

Yes, there is a tension between how in minimalism we want less physical stuff whereas how in the, uh, “intentional tech” movement (sometimes called “digital minimalism”) there’s 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...

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...

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...

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...