A journal for burns
Not the big stuff. The good stuff. Whoever handed you soup at 4am. The thing said at the fire that quietly rearranged your head. The build nobody photographed because everyone was busy looking at it.
BurnJourn is a button you press in the dark that means this one counts. That is all it asks of you on the night. The writing happens in the week after, while you can still hear it.
Every other app wants a caption. But somewhere around dusk you stop being a person with a phone and start being a person at a burn, and a text box is exactly the wrong thing to hand that person.
So after dark this thing shuts up. Three buttons, fixed in a triangle, so your thumb finds them without your eyes. Press one, catch a wash of colour in the corner of your vision, put the phone away. There is no feed. There is nothing to scroll. There is nothing here to be clever in.
Demo. Nothing here touches your camera, microphone or location. This device has no vibration, so the bloom is the only confirmation — which is the point.
Have a go — nothing here touches your camera, mic or location. The colour is the confirmation. It is colour rather than a buzz because Apple took vibration away from web apps, and a button that confirms silently on half the phones in a field is a broken button.
The deal
One consequence worth saying plainly: lose the phone, lose the journal. Nobody can restore it for you, because nobody else has it. That is why the export exists, and why the app will remind you to use it more than once.
You talked to someone for an hour at 3am. Neither of you thought to swap names. They are gone, and you would very much like them not to be.
That is the one thing this ever grows into — a way for people who were actually standing near each other to find each other afterwards, once everyone is home. Opt in, one memory at a time. Not this year, and not by accident: nothing you marked private ever gets reclassified later, including by us changing our minds.
Decompression
You are back at a desk. Your body is still in a field. It is all still in you with nowhere to put it, and the people you would tell about it were not there.
There is also a clock on it, and this is the part worth knowing. Memory does not fade evenly. The facts will hang around for years — you will always be able to say what happened. What goes early is the feel of it, and it goes at exactly the speed you return to normal life. Write it in the first week and you can still hear it. Leave it a month and you are describing a photograph of a night rather than the night.
So this is not a gentle drip. This is the one week this app is pushy, and it is pushy on purpose.
Drag through the hours and it comes back — every moment you flagged, threaded in sequence. Rarely the order you would have told it in.
5:10am
24/24
What are you going to do next?
A sample night, invented for this page. Tap a point of light to see what was sealed with it.
Forty blank boxes in one sitting and you will fill in exactly none of them, so you only ever see one. Finish it and the next one is already there. That is not rationing — it is that one at a time is the only way anybody ever gets through forty. Stay up too late and do nine of them. That is the good outcome. That is the whole idea.
Each one arrives with something to start from. What that is, you can find out yourself. The blank page is the enemy here and it does not appear anywhere in this app.
No streak to protect, nothing to come back for, nothing to sell you. It nags for a week because a week is when it matters, and then it shuts up for good and becomes a file in your drawer.
And one turns up again a year later, unannounced. That one is not homework.
Your journal exports as a single page. It opens in any browser, on any device, with the photos and the audio inside the file itself. Print it and it folds into a zine. Give it to someone. Put it in a drawer for ten years and it will still open.
You never need an app to read it. Including ours. Especially ours. If this project disappears tomorrow, that file still works — which is the only promise on this site that does not depend on us still being here.
You could. You will not.
Notes wants a title, a cursor, and a sentence you are prepared to have written. At 3am you will open it, look at the blinking line, decide you will do it properly in the morning, and put the phone back in your pocket. That is the memory gone.
Your camera roll has the same problem from the other end: four hundred photos and no idea which eight mattered.
This wants a thumb. That is the entire difference, and it turns out to be the whole thing.
Not for our sake — there is no number here that goes up. On your home screen it gets its own storage that the browser will not quietly bin, and it runs with no signal at all, which is the situation you are driving towards. Left as a browser tab, iOS can wipe the lot after a week of you not opening it. Rough way to find that out.
The other reason is dumber and just as real: you are not going to be downloading anything at the event. Do it at home, on wifi, while you still can.
Nothing to sign up for. There is nothing to sign up to.