A Desolate Place

For as long as I can remember, one of the first things I ever do on a brand new device is install an ad blocker. Ads are so intrusive, a security risk, and just make using the internet a huge pain. Using someone else’s computer with no ad blocker is a jarring experience. My idea of a perfect ad blocker is the kind you only have to look at once, when you set it up. I want minimal interaction and I want it to take care of me no matter what strange part of the internet I might find myself in. I recently made the switch to the Safari browser on Mac, and I was a little annoyed by how difficult it was to find such an ad blocker for it. After trying several options, none very good I might add, I realized I already had an excellent ad blocker that I trusted and met my needs on my iPhone — AdGuard.

AdGuard is incredible. Once it was set up, I no longer had to interact with it again. I made some minor adjustments to the filtering rules, nothing too crazy and super easy to do, but that was it. All the ads that were cluttering my favorite sites were no longer there, and I could finally watch YouTube videos without ads interrupting me every few minutes.

Sometimes, I buy stationery products overseas so I occasionally frequent some Japanese and Chinese commerce websites. When I did this the first time, I got a little notification from AdGuard informing me that it would be applying ad-filtering rules for that language. I love it! This is the kind of interaction I will accept, where my ad blocker tells me, “Hey, just letting you know I’m still protecting you, even if you didn’t set up filters for this language.” Then the pop-up goes away and that the first and last time I saw it. Perfect!

I never really know how to begin posting things, so I thought I'd write about something I like. This is my Traveler's Notebook. I've had this notebook for a little over a decade now, and I couldn’t imagine not having it at this point. It’s my commonplace book, a collection of my thoughts, ideas, recipes, quotes, reminders, ephemera, and anything else that I might want to remember later on.

For the uninitiated, the TN system is just a big piece of leather, and you buy notebook inserts for it to customize it to your needs. You can customize it whichever way works best for you, or repurpose it entirely if you decide to use it for something else. It’s very versatile.

I decided to go the analog route, physically writing on paper, because keeping thoughts inside an app or file feels very impersonal and I lose interest quickly. I definitely keep more information in digital notebooks, but I found a lot of that was less useful to me.

Weaning myself away from tech, as a huge lover of tech, was challenging to me but it has been very rewarding to relearn skills I lost over time, like having legible handwriting. When was the last time you sat down and wrote a letter to someone?

Before my TN, I used a Hobonichi. If I'm being honest, I mostly bought it because I'm a big fan of minä perhonen, and I discovered that Hobonichi has regular collabs with minä perhonen for cover designs. The above is the 'wood bird' cover, paired with the Sailor Pro Gear Slim Dragon Palace fountain pen. I've since sold both these beautiful artifacts, but using them was such a fun experience to me as a stationary nerd.