terriko

Trying something new: I haven’t been reviewing books because it takes a long time to write reviews on my phone, and I’d been working on reducing my phone screen time. But I’ve been using my computer more to write fanfic so I’m going to see if weekly book posts are more likely to happen now than they were last time I tried.

My books

(first one I own, other two from the library)

Kitemaster by Jim Hines. I accidentally pre-ordered this twice, which probably gives you some idea of how I felt about it. A young woman mourning her husband goes to release his spirit kite only to discover she has developed a rare magical gift, and she soon attracts the attention of some very powerful people… I loved the worldbuilding around kite magic (safety lines! The spirit kites!) and the sky serpents and the poetic legends about dragons and the evil queen and the sky pirates and the race of monkey-like people. Maybe it feels particularly good to me right now because I’ve been playing a game which includes a lot of gliding around in the sky, but I wanted to live in this world. There’s also a lot about grief and cultural traditions around mourning in there, in a way that I had to stop and let it sink in sometimes. In a good way.

Halfway There – A graphic novel about being half Japanese and half American, but mostly it was about finding yourself and depression. Her experience of people’s weird reactions to her being “hafu” resonated but the self-loathing not so much.

The Roommate by Rosie Danan – I’ve read a few from her and they’re all different. I find it kind of hilarious that I felt like this one was less believable than the werewolf one but honestly I love a kind of absurd premise as long as the characters are fun. And they are! Just… I’d recommend Fan Service (the werewolf book) over this one. It’s the most recent one and I think the characters are even better despite the premise being more absurd.

Kid books:

Catnapped is a repeat, so kiddo liked it enough to get it out again. Or he liked that it has a cat in it and he’s got this thing where he wants his allergic dad to fake sneeze for fake cats so my kid is extra motivated to get cat books out of the library.

Bob and Joss get lost – ok but no repeat requests on this one

Amazing Grace – never read it, kid wasn’t interested. (Recall: we get mystery bags from the library and not all of them are winners for him)

Storm Whale in Winter – spawned some good conversations about snow safety but no repeat requests

Little Blue Truck Makes a Friend – kid had fun with the animal noises but was mad I made him read some of this so it was slower going than it could have been.

Charlie Chooses – very cute, lots of dogs, we read this a few times.

Toby – another repeat. cute dog, kind of melancholy story so i was surprised he got it out again.

Board Game

Despite the giant box this is mostly a card/dice game where you build a little city and money based on dice roles hitting your numbers. None of the cards are secret held in your hand, so that was great for my kid’s reading level (he can read but it’s a lot of work and he gets tired of doing it), and the rounds are pretty fast and the rules not too complicated. We may buy a copy of this one.

I had this idea to do some socks tracking how much time I was spending staring at my phone. A lot of knitters track things like temperatures, but that’s never really interested me, so I set about thinking about data that I’d like to track and could do with relatively minimal effort. (Some people may be good at tracking; I am not naturally inclined to it.) My phone provides me a screen time breakdown, so I thought that would be a good candidate and started taking a look at it to see what colours I’d want to use and what increments of time should represent one row and so on.

But what I discovered, when I started looking, was that I regularly had my phone screen on for more than 5 hours a day. That seemed like… a lot. I felt a lot the way I’d felt about TV in my 20s: it wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I could use the time for things I’d enjoy more. (Also for getting a PhD, but that’s probably not completely related to my dislike of TV.)

So instead of setting up my knitting project (which I still haven’t done but probably will eventually), I set about figuring out how to reduce how much time I spent looking at my phone.

Looking at my data

Once I started looking at my data, I realized there *were* some extenuating circumstances: I’d often spend an hour with my phone open to a knitting pattern but it’s not like I was actually looking at it the whole time. Sometimes I’d accidentally leave my tea timer on screen for an hour while my tea oversteeped (a tragedy for me as it gets too tannin-y). Sometimes the screen time was due to having GPS navigation on, which, again, didn’t feel like it should count. But some days I really was just looking at my phone that often.

One of the things that helped the most was having a big widget on the screen of my phone telling me how much time I’d already spent using the device (I put it beside my weather widget where I’d tend to look). I paired this with stickers in my journal every time I went below my target amount of time, so then I found myself correcting if I felt like I’d used too much time for the day already.

Another thing that helped was just setting the screen auto-shutoff to be more aggressive (30s vs a minute, making it so apps couldn’t keep the screen on) so I wasn’t having it on by accident. That helped me figure out where I was really spending my time, and did reduce my numbers just by itself (and improved my battery usage considerably!)

Removing low-value time sinks

My phone actually up and died partway through this project, in a way that I couldn’t carry over all my settings and apps. And that turned out to be convenient for this because I had to make conscious decisions about what to install. But also inconvenient because I lost all my screen time data from before this project so it’s very hard to compare!

Things that went:

• Most mobile games. A lot of these have kind of dark-pattern things to keep you logging in each day but once I broke the streaks because I had no phone for a week I decided I could just… not do that. I kept a few but I’m finding I play them less because they just don’t feel as rewarding as my Switch games now.





• Removed most social media, tuned what was left to have less stuff (mostly turning off boosts for most people in Mastodon, being more aggressive about my filters, unfollowing a few people who weren’t bringing me joy but *were* bringing a lot of posts.)





• Threw out most of my RSS feeds. I used to follow a lot more news and craft stuff, but the news was making me miserable and the craft stuff was encouraging me to buy supplies I didn’t need. I kept enough so I could be an informed voter for my riding and read my friends blogs, then culled down the rest.





• Most notifications got turned off. Wow, there were a lot of notifications.





• Swapped my phone to “flip for silent” and put a pretty case on it so I was more likely to flip it. This doesn’t seem like it should have made a big difference because I already had it in do not disturb frequently, but just taking it out of my pocket and putting it down made just that little bit more friction when I went to “just quick check something” so it wound up helping.

Finding other things to do

The big things I wanted to more of were: play actually good games (instead of crappy mobile dark pattern nonsense) and read books/fanfic. So I started actually carrying around my ereader in my pocket and learned how to stuff it with fanfic so I didn’t have to read a whole darned novel when I just wanted to do something for a few minutes while I was waiting for my tea or whatever, and I fell in love with playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on my Nintendo Switch so I started carrying that around in my knitting back (too big for my pockets, alas. Though I did also pull out my 3DS which is more pocketable.)

It’s kind of goofy to be proud of replacing some of my phone time with looking at different screens, but I am getting a *lot* more enjoyment out of my gaming time, and since I’m not *scrolling* for a tiny screen while holding a device, I can enjoy reading longer stuff while knitting. It’s also been great for connecting with my kid, as we’re currently both playing Zelda games and sharing tips and showing off stuff we’ve done.

The amusing thing about switching to my ereader was that it forced me to spend more time on my actual computer to transfer files, which encouraged me to spend more time doing personal writing. You haven’t seen this on the blog yet because I’ve been writing fiction rather than blog posts, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I’m not finishing a novel anytime soon, but I feel like I’m stretching some mental muscles and having fun. So far I’m mostly writing fanfic which is nice because people actually read it. I’ve also found great delight in writing more comments on fanfic that I enjoyed. It’s probably obvious in hindsight, but when you write to tell an author how much you appreciate them a lot of them write back with really thoughtful responses (I know, I know, who knew writers could write) and after all the AI crap I had to deal with for Google Summer of Code this year it’s felt amazing to talk to humans without some chatbot in between. Honestly, it feels pleasantly minorly transgressive to be writing un-monetizable fanfic by hand given the state of capitalism and art right now.

I haven’t really been into fanfic since the last time I was seriously burned out after finishing my PhD thesis and moving to the US and developing both migraines and a problem requiring surgery. (It was a rough two years as much as it was a great two years.) So I’m reading fanfic again and, no surprise, I’m hideously burned out now because of *gestures at everything*. I’m in a completely different fandom than I was last time and doing different stuff (last time I was an artist!) but it’s still helping me cope with the burnout as well as changing what my screen time looks like.

Beyond the “let’s just use different screens” strategy, I’ve been reading more books and starting to do some drawing and I continue to knit although I don’t think I’ve done particularly *more* of that since I already knit a lot. I did a decent stint where I was spinnning until March but I’m taking a break on that right now. Now that the weather is nicer, maybe I’ll get some biking time in too.

So how did it work?

Well, it’s May 2025 and I started putting stickers on my calendar in January 2025. I’ve gone from “regularly looking at my phone for 5+ hours per day” to “only exceeding 3 hours a couple of times per month, often with extenuating circumstances like being sick.”

I probably could have gone lower than my new normal of around 2.5 hours on average, but I found when tracked it that all the days I went over 2hrs it included stuff that brought actual connection: chatting with friends or editing and sharing pictures or writing about books. So I’m not inclined to go any lower than that, although I *did* move some writing stuff to my computer so it doesn’t show up on the phone time tracking when i realized how long it took me to write some things on my phone.

The greatest result has been more connection time with my kid: not because we’re gaming together (we already did that) but because I now am playing the single player games he likes as well. This started before I started really focusing on phone time, back when I bought Echoes of Wisdom for us in the fall, but I’ve been happy to find that the single player gaming doesn’t have to be a “selfish” use of my time since we share some similar tastes in games. It hasn’t really increased our offline time much because the phone screen time was happening when we were both exhausted, but now when I sit and he wants to watch videos after school while he eats his snack and rests for a bit, I’m getting gaming or reading time in instead of scrolling while I wait for him to finish. It’s not perfect — I’m more grumpy about being interrupted during some games than I would have been in boredom mode on my phone — but I think it’s better overall.

What’s next?

I feel like I’ve made the habit change I wanted and I’m going to stop putting stickers in my planner almost every day (though they’re weirdly motivating, so I’ll likely keep them for some new habit tracking). I’ll keep the screen time reminders and other phone setting changes I made. I’m not intending to be quite so aggressive about cutting myself off after 2h, but I *have* bought a new game and new books now that I have time for them, and I’ve got a bunch of writing in progress so I feel like I’m at the point where the change will stick.

I might finally get around to knitting the screen time socks that I had planned, now that I feel better about what the data will show about me!

Overall, I learned some about my habits and made a good change. Go me!

I took these pictures back at the beginning of March and never posted them, so you get them on the last day instead!

Stickers

• The cat calendar sticker, as always, is from By Mossy Pine.





• The dino stickers are all from an old stickii pack I grabbed during a sale called “Rawr!” or something similar.

March’s Fountain Pen/Ink Combos:

• Kaweco sport <medium> filled with Diamine Twilight, a dark blue-black ink. This ink was a present!





• Nahvalur Original+ <stub> filled with Diamine Aurora Borealis, a dark teal ink with a very tiny amount of red sheen. This ink was also a present!





• TWSBI Eco <medium> filled with Diamine Noble Fir from the 2024 inkvent calendar, a bright green ink with shimmer. This one carried over from last month’s palette.





• Pilot Metropolitan <CM> filled with Pilot Iroshizuku yama-budo, a dark fuschia ink with some green sheen. I’m using a refilled cartridge to see if I like it better than the included converter, and it *is* nice to be able to see how much ink is left, but it means I’m reluctant to change the ink (and potentially wear out the cartridge faster).





• Pilot E95S <medium> filled with Pilot Iroshizuku ama-iro, a bright sky-blue ink.

Since this is the end of the month, I’ll say that all of these worked out pretty well, but I did have a bunch of hard starts on the Nahvalur pen, likely due to my inexperience using a vacuum pen (I’ve had this since the fall but haven’t always had it in rotation). I’d hoped to maybe use this as a travel pen eventually but I probably should have gotten a thinner nib on it for that to work better, I don’t know. It’s kind of a moot point as travel has become unappealing at the moment.

I’m also realizing that I *really* appreciate the converters when it comes to changing inks every month, and the piston fillers can be kind of a chore in comparison. I may need to rethink how often I change inks and plan my palettes differently so more colours carry over depending on which pen they’re in. I’ve slowed in my pen acquisitions now that I’ve got a range of nibs and such to try, but I did pick up a small box of cartridge-filled ones as an impulse buy at Powell’s so you’ll see at least one of those next month.

I haven’t finished this iroful journal yet, but I’ve decided to leave the rest of the pages for pen testing and ink swatches since I like the paper for that but don’t love it for writing journal entries or todo lists. The plan is to pull out a notebook with faster drying paper for April.