TL;DRI built a Chrome extension to help me read more good books and less bad news.
There's a lot of shitty news happening lately, and I've been having trouble holding space for it all.
I've noticed that my 2020-doomscrolling habit has started to ramp back up, so I built a Google Chrome extension (with a little help from Gemini) that automatically redirects my browser to a Kindle book in my library whenever I try to go to a site that I think is hurting my mental health:
It's been a nice, gentle reminder that following the news is one thing, but drowning myself in it is another thing entirely. Instead of drinking from the firehose of badness, I can stay up to date with a few select, timely sources, and then redirect myself to something more productive when I try to get another hit, like reading a relevant history book to better understand the current cultural and political moment.
This is a thing I built for me, but I thought I'd share in case anyone else is in the same boat. I've added no analytics, no data collection, no monetization, no account creation, or anything else.
Just a simple, single-purpose browser extension.
You can find it on the Chrome Web Store here if you're interested: Go Read a Book - Chrome Web Store
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