The String Of Beads That Gets You Home Without A Phone

Revenue Operations for Creators — Four bucks for the back office nobody hands a solo creator: ten numbered systems that run from tracking what you’re making to a dashboard that tells you if the business is actually working, plus a ten-tab workbook and a quarterly audit that makes every subscription justify itself out loud before it renews again. The Friday review takes thirty minutes, the kind you actually run instead of meaning to. 115 people already bought it, more than anything else on the shelf that isn’t free. I’m not the only one who needed this written down.

Ecumenical Occulture: The Importance of In-Person Connection — Sef Salem’s been to enough occult conferences to notice the actual mechanism: an OTO member and a Traditional Witch and a Santeria practitioner get stuck in the same room, and they argue for real, with rules, instead of running the anonymous pile-on version social media rewards. He’s marking forty years of the International Thelemic Symposium, the thing that got warring Thelemic factions into one building in Oxford back in 1986 and kept them talking. Worth reading if you’ve ever wondered why your favorite online community got meaner exactly when it got bigger.

THE TIP. Land navigation starts with knowing your own stride, not staring at a phone. Pace out a known hundred meters (a football field’s close) and count every time your right foot hits the ground. That number is your pace count. Mine runs higher loaded than empty, higher uphill than down, so count it the way you’ll actually be walking, not on a clean sidewalk in sneakers. Thread a cord with beads, one bead per hundred meters, and slide one over every time your count clicks past your number. No signal required. No battery to die on you at the worst possible minute. The Army still teaches nineteen-year-olds with a phone in their pocket to do it this way, because the phone is exactly the thing that dies first: cold, wet, or just out of coverage. Recalibrate every couple months, or the day you drop weight or add a rucksack. Set it once in March and never touch it again, and some night you’re trusting beads that quit matching your feet months back, and you find that out in the dark, short of the treeline. Most people land somewhere in the sixties on flat ground, counting one foot. Under fifty and you were running. Over eighty and you were taking dainty little steps to make the math come out pretty, which everybody does the first time they try it. Walk the hundred twice and average the two, because the first pass is always a bit self-conscious.

Go count your own damn steps sometime and tell me what your pace count comes out to. Bet it’s not what you think it is. ~ J.D.