Abermoo

I realized it just yesterday, right in the moment when I felt myself slipping into this strange, almost fantastical mental world, one that only appears when you’re truly offline. No buzzing phone, no glowing tabs, no endless scroll. Just the soft hum of real life, the analog one we keep forgetting exists. And as I wandered deeper into that quiet space, it hit me: this, right here, might be the new rebellion. The new cool. The thing everyone else has forgotten how to do.

There’s a new kind of person emerging quiet, unannounced, slipping out of the chaos while no one’s looking. Not rebels with banners, just folks who decide to open a door everyone else pretends isn’t there. While most of the world is sprinting after every trend like hunters chasing ghosts, these people slowly back away, out into the open air. And strangely enough, they’re the ones who suddenly look cool. Unbothered. Untouchable. Maybe because, in a world addicted to noise, it takes real strength to sit in silence.

You recognize them by the way they can read a book for more than ten minutes without twitching for a notification. They build things with their hands, play old GameBoys, fix broken radios, scribble in notebooks, like they found a hidden tunnel back to a time when patience wasn’t a superpower. They don’t look disconnected. They look free. As if they’ve figured out something the rest of us are too dazzled to notice: that staying offline is becoming a form of mastery.

And somewhere between the trees, between the soft scratch of paper and the comforting clack of retro buttons, they reclaim something rare: time. Not purchased, not scheduled more reclaimed. Meanwhile, a growing crowd buries itself deeper into VR worlds, hunting for a life that feels better than the one outside their window. But another crowd is retreating from all that, instinctively, like animals sensing a storm, choosing the woods over the neon-lit labyrinth.

The split is coming; maybe it’s already here. On one side, those who sink into the digital abyss until it becomes more home than reality. On the other, those who step out, blinking in the sunlight, learning to slow the world down by slowing themselves down first. The chronically offline. The grass-touchers. The kids who refuse to let their minds be chewed apart by constant stimulation. The new cool kids.

And if you’re wondering which side you’re on. Well if even a small part of you felt an urge to go outside while reading this, to breathe something real, to break the spell of the screen, then you’re already halfway there. All that’s left is the final step.

So log off.
Not later. Now.

Go outside. Touch the earth. Remember what it feels like to be a person again.
The revolution won’t happen online
it starts the moment you leave.

I wonder how best to craft an adventure. Maybe I can build it entirely in my mind first, then try to pour what I see onto paper. Every decision in this world could be guided by dice rolls even fights, even the choices themselves. My idea for this blog is that it will be text-only. No pictures, because images always shove a style down the reader’s throat and I want the imagination to roam free.

So far, I don’t have a perfect solution. Yesterday, I started with my character a little dwarf and plunged straight into the world. The dice are in my hand; I slip them into my leather pouch and prepare to begin.

It would be thrilling not to do this alone. Comments could shape the story, twist it in ways I can’t anticipate. An interactive story, a collaboration with unseen minds behind screens. But in this age, do people even want that? Social media has dulled the ability to actively steer one’s own life. Most of them wander in zombie-like states, chasing trends, flicking from one short-lived thrill to the next. If there’s no immediate bang, no explosion, boredom sets in fast, and they move on. That can’t last. That’s no good path at all.

So, onward to the adventure. The land, at least from the dwarf’s perspective, is quiet, almost too quiet. I set off down the road to take a closer look. In the distance, a small village perches on a rise. Mmmm… I think to myself, that’s the ideal place to explore. Perhaps I’ll meet other souls there and who knows maybe the first real adventure awaits.

I chuckle into my beard, adjusting the strap of my pouch and set a course toward the village, its silhouette faint against the far-off horizon…

I’m tired of it. All this waiting. Waiting for other worlds I can’t touch, can’t twist, can’t bend to my will. You understand? I want to lose myself somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t here. It used to be easier, back when life didn’t yank at your attention like a greedy child every five minutes. But now… now it feels almost impossible to let go, to just fall into another place.

So I’m taking a different path. Don’t know if it’ll work. Don’t know if it’ll lead anywhere at all. But it has to be done. I can’t keep going like this.

It’s been sitting on my desk for years, this little black cube with white numbers engraved into it. You know the type. It has that strange, magnetic feel, the kind of object your fingers reach for before your mind even notices. When I sit at my wooden worktable, it’s always there, on the right side, waiting. Can you see it? That small dark cube with its soft, matte surface. And just like always, I’ve picked it up again without thinking, rolling it between my fingers.

I close my eyes.

And just like that, I’m gone.

Another world. Far from here. Far from now.

Tomorrow, I’ll go deeper. I’ll explore the places that have been pulling me in for so long. This is a magical world, one built for strange adventures, for stories that scrape at the edges of the ordinary and push through to something else entirely. And I’m taking you with me. Let’s see how far we get.

Who am I? Picture a dwarven warrior straight out of the Middle Ages: short, beard trailing down his chest, blunt as a hammer when he speaks. He loves the wild places, the open paths. He hungers for adventure. And of course, how could it be otherwise, there’s a black cube in his hand.

He tucks it into the leather pouch tied at his waist. Then he stands.

A long road stretches before him.

At last, the adventure begins analog…

Okay. I look at myself. Start of the week. The weekend was “empty”. Hollow. Really hollow. I wait. I wait for something. The terrible part? I don’t even know what.

I thought I was waiting for the new mega-game, Light No Fire by Hello Games. To step into a world where I could get lost. Like I did nearly ten years ago with Minecraft. But wait… getting lost in a digital world really just means fun. Creativity. Building things. Making things yours.

Getting lost in that kind of world also means not dealing with yourself. Not dealing with your surroundings. Maybe it’s a subconscious choice, because if you didn’t, the stress, the chaos of life would press down on you so hard you’d go insane. So these virtual worlds, they’re refuge. They’re protection.

And the bonus? You don’t have to face what’s happening out there, not really, because you’re somewhere else. Somewhere that isn’t here.

Your own revolution could start tonight. For you. If only this new game you’re itching for appeared in the digital ether, if only you could download it, dive in, vanish. Not forever, but for a long while.

But wait… that’s not analog. Maybe I should go back out into the real world. Feel it. Touch it. Haptic. You understand.

Hmmm. A difficult choice. Especially since this new digital world hasn’t arrived yet.

But in the meantime: more on that tomorrow…

Like I wrote yesterday, there’s that ten-year study saying our attention spans have taken a nosedive dramatically, catastrophically. And I feel it. I see it in the people around me, in their jittery eyes and half-finished sentences. I see it out there in the world, too, in train stations and cafés and dim-lit bars where everyone scrolls like they’re trying to scratch an itch buried beneath their skin. The world has changed and not in some subtle, creeping way. It’s changed like a tremor under your feet, almost too fast to understand, too loud to ignore.

I tried to figure out the real reason. The machines themselves? No. We had devices long before the internet swallowed us whole. It’s not the tools, it’s the packaging. The way the content is designed, engineered, wrapped in algorithms that know us better than our own mothers. Doom-scrolling, tailored feeds, the endless drip of digital dopamine… it’s the packaging that’s changed into something sharper, hungrier.

Last night I sat down and thought about all this for a long, long time. And it hit me: there must be others who feel this too, others who sense something’s wrong in the air. But from the perspective of the masses, we’re a tiny tribe, almost invisible. People who actually notice the cracks in the system, who try (and sometimes fail) to resist it. Sure, each of us can try to change our own habits, pull back from the glowing screen, silence the noise. But it’s hard. Like trying to walk away from a carnival that’s been designed to never let you leave.

The bigger problem is that the masses can’t break out of this cycle. And I keep wondering where that leads us. Because no single person has the power to steer a crowd that doesn’t even realize it’s drifting.

Sure, you could stage a protest like Greta Thunberg did, sit down and shout into the storm. But this is different. This is a drug, subtle and sweet. Humans need connection the way we need food and water. You can’t just switch that off. And the crowd, most people lean into this artificial togetherness because it’s always there, always warm, always whispering their name.

So here we are.
I don’t see a solution. Not for everyone. For individuals, maybe if they’re strong enough to say “no” to the addiction. But for the masses? For the billions locked into the loop? I don’t see a way out. It feels like a stalemate, a deadlock, the kind of situation where you stare into the future and the future stares back with empty eyes.

Looks like my weekend will be a thoughtful one… maybe a little too thoughtful.
Sorry for the dark mood. But you asked and I can only tell it the way I see it.

Okay, Thursday. Time to get ready for the weekend.
Wait ready? For what, exactly?

You ever notice how we say things like that get ready for the weekend as if it’s a ritual? A small prayer we mumble to ourselves before the world chews us up again. But lately, I’ve been wondering if the weekend’s really something to look forward to or just another pause between notifications.

Because here’s the thing. There’s a problem. A big one. And it’s sitting right there in your pocket, glowing faintly like a radioactive stone. Your phone. My phone. The screens. The scroll. The slow, sweet poison of “just one more look.”

There’s a study, I wish I were making this up, called “Rising Cognitive Disability as a Public Health Concern Among US Adults.” Ten years of data. Ten years of watching the human mind quietly lose its footing.

The numbers are… well, “frightening” doesn’t quite cover it. From 2013 to 2023, the percentage of adults reporting serious trouble concentrating, remembering, or making decisions jumped from 5.3% to 7.4%. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Just a couple of percentage points. But that’s millions of people. Millions.

And here’s the real kick in the teeth: the biggest jump isn’t in the elderly. It’s in the young the 18 to 39 crowd. The ones who grew up online, who’ve never known silence, who sleep with their phones the way kids once slept with teddy bears. Their rate of cognitive disability almost doubled.

Maybe you feel it too. That fog. That creeping sense that your attention is leaking out of you, one scroll at a time. You open your phone to check one thing, and suddenly you’re thirty minutes older and no wiser. The light of the screen feels colder now, doesn’t it?

We need to talk about this. Not in the “public health crisis” kind of way though it is that but in the personal horror kind of way. The kind where you wake up one morning and realize you can’t hold a thought steady anymore.

So yeah. It’s Thursday. Time to get ready for the weekend.
But maybe, just maybe it’s also time to put the phone down.

Before the weekend’s the only thing we remember at all.

Tonight, I had another one of my analog crafting sessions. There’s something almost sacred about it cutting, folding, piecing things together by hand while the rest of the world scrolls itself into a digital blur.

I’ve got this strange little hobby: taking games that people usually buy online those slick, polished analog packages and building them myself, piece by piece, out of paper and ink. There are online stores for solo board gamers, whole libraries of dungeon crawlers you can print at home. You download the files, feed them into your printer and before long, you’re breathing life into something that was once just code and pixels. It’s cheaper that way sure, but it’s more than that. There’s a quiet satisfaction in feeling the paper between your fingers, in knowing that the game exists because you made it real.

Tonight’s creation was Tin Helm, a solo dungeon crawler from one of the better-known designers in that scene. I printed all the cards on my black&white laser printer no color, just stark contrasts, like something out of an old pulp novel. I slipped each card into clear plastic sleeves, neat and perfect. Two dice joined the mix, along with a handful of tiny translucent cubes red, blue, green to mark health, damage, status.

It’s funny. Everything fits perfectly into a single deck box now, like a secret waiting to be opened. Tomorrow, I’ll venture into that dungeon for the first time. I can already feel the anticipation humming somewhere beneath my ribs.

But the truth is, it’s not even about the game. It’s about the making, the sound of scissors cutting card stock, the faint hum of the printer, the rhythm of it all. It’s calm. Analog calm. The kind that creeps up on you when you’re too busy to notice you’ve found peace in the simplest of things.

I stumbled across an article today, one of those little digital whispers that promises salvation through a screen. It suggested using an Apple Watch instead of an iPhone. Yes, really. The pitch? No time-sucking social media apps, just all the “essential” features for life on the go. They called it a “digital detox.”

I’m sorry, but I have to say it: that is utter nonsense. If I want a detox from the digital, the last thing I want is another digital device, even one slightly less flashy. Am I wrong here? I don’t think so.

For me, finding the balance between the digital and the analog world has always required something purer, something untouchable by notifications. I can’t go weeks at a stretch, but taking segments of time chunks of hours, even days completely away from the digital and stepping fully into the analog world, that’s where the magic happens.

And it works. For me, anyway. The first few steps in that analog realm are the hardest, but the effects are immediate. The more I immerse myself in a world without screens, the better I feel. I’m calmer, less stressed, more satisfied. Maybe I could push even further, explore deeper analog territories but even the initial steps are enough to make a difference.

So, if you see an article claiming you can “detox” while still glued to a digital gadget, take it with a heavy dose of skepticism. Sometimes, the real cure is nothing but paper, pen and the stubborn refusal to look at a screen. And in my experience, that’s been enough to remind me what life without notifications actually feels like.

Wait a second…
that’s grass.

Oh yes fresh, living grass filling my nose with that wild, earthy scent. I push myself up from the ground, my palms brushing against the cool soil and open my eyes to a wide, endless landscape beneath a painter’s blue sky. I breathe in deep. The air is crisp, almost cold enough to sting, but it feels good, real good.

I take my first steps.
Each one echoes faintly against the earth, the dry whisper of fallen leaves crackling beneath my boots. The sound is grounding, intimate. The kind of sound you only notice when the rest of the world shuts up for a minute.

The air turns cooler. Autumn is rolling in, pulling everything it touches into its slow, golden spiral.

I walk on, eyes scanning the ground until I spot a small stone, half-buried in dirt. I crouch, pick it up, wipe the dust away with my thumb and there it is. A symbol. Faint, carved deep into the rock.

A dragon rune?

I squint, frown a little. Haven’t seen that mark in a long, long time.

I slip the stone into my pocket, feeling its weight, feeling like it means something, though I don’t yet know what. Infinite possibilities stretch before me, where should I go first?

Down by the hill, a brook glitters in the fading light. The water looks fresh, pure enough to slice through the cold. A good place to fill my flask, I think. Water’s good for the soul. Keeps you alive longer in worlds like this.

And then…

A voice cuts through the scene like a knife through silk.
“Dinner’s ready!”

My wife’s voice. Real, warm, close.

I look up, my hand still clutching the dice.
“Coming!” I call back. “Just need to jot down this discovery before I forget.”

I set the dice beside my old wooden table, the kind that creaks when you lean on it and smile to myself.

People these days, always lost in their digital worlds, online, staring at screens. They don’t know what they’re missing. The sound of dice rolling on real wood. The smell of pencil shavings. The quiet tension of imagination alive and breathing in a single, analog room with a hand made solo rpg.

I grin, stand up and head toward dinner,
already hungry for the next adventure waiting in the margins of my notebook.

Okay, I’ve been working on this for a long time.

A really long time. But now it’s here.
Something that’s going to change everything forever.

Picture this: you’re out somewhere, your head full of thoughts that won’t stay still. They rattle around like ghosts in an attic and all you want is a way to let them out. Somewhere to put them so your brain can finally breathe again.

I’ve written about this before, you know. About how badly we need something like that.
But now it’s real.
And it’s thrilling.

Listen closely. Imagine a device that can store your thoughts in high definition every color, every flicker of imagination, without limits. The memory? Expandable, infinite, enough to last your whole life. You can add more whenever you need. No subscriptions, no corporate leash around your neck.

The battery? You won’t believe it. It lasts longer than you think a day can last.
And it’s completely offline. Safe. Private. Yours. You can move your data online if you want, sure but you don’t have to. Your thoughts stay where they belong: in your pocket.

It’s small. Comfortable. Comes in colors that speak your name.
And the best part? No monopoly owns it. You get to decide who makes it for you.
You’ll learn how to use it fast, faster than you think. Doesn’t matter if you’re young or old. It’s made for you.

The price? You decide that too. No subscription models, no hidden traps.

Oh, and did I mention the smell? That beautiful, clean scent that makes you want to dive in.
The touch soft, real, alive.

Curious yet? You should be.
Because this thing it’s going to change your analog life forever.

So be ready for something incredible.
Your new analog paper notebook, in the color of your choice, is waiting for you.
In any store, anywhere. You just have to discover it. And start using it.

You understand now, don’t you?