Ad Astra

Ad Astra puts a few seconds between the impulse and the tab. Head for a site you've chosen to gate — Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit and YouTube to start; the list is yours to change — and you land in a painted forest clearing instead. A dandelion seed drifts across the sky, and that drift is the timer: about twelve seconds, and then you can proceed to the website. You can turn back whenever you want. Going through is fine too; nothing is scored, and the site opens without re-gating for fifteen minutes once you've decided. THE CLEARING Every new tab becomes the clearing. Its light follows your actual clock — warm gold at dawn, deep green by day, amber at dusk, fireflies after dark. There's a search box, because a new tab is still a new tab. Below the search box is a control panel for focus sessions. THE WALL The day's tasks live on sticky notes in a band across the clearing. The blank note at the end is the pen — press it to write a new note. Press a note to change it, carry it to move it, and the check turns it grass green: finished notes keep their place for the rest of the day, so the wall holds the day's shape until it refreshes daily at 3am. Unfinished notes do not go away. A note can be deleted by opening it and using the × in its corner. THE BOX AT THE GATE Whatever you wanted to access the website for — a reply, a name, nothing in particular — can be set down in the box at the gate so the thought stops circling. Held thoughts wait in the corner of the new tab, in the popup and in the side panel, with the site and the hour. You can clear the list in the popup. FOCUS SESSIONS Twenty-five, forty-five or sixty minutes, started from the popup, the new tab, or the side panel. During a session the gated sites are closed outright. The seed still crosses, but the way does not open even once the seed has landed, and tabs already sitting on gated sites are closed when the session starts. Ending early takes a deliberate three-second hold. THE WATER Once you're through the gate, the time you actually spend is counted: a thirty-minute budget, pooled across every gated site. Fifteen minutes on Instagram and fifteen on Reddit is thirty minutes, not two allowances. And you watch it being spent. Water rises slowly from the foot of the page, and a small anatomical brain bobs up a few minutes in and rides the surface: floating high through the early stretch, settling lower through the back half, slipping under as the budget runs out. The clock only runs while you're actually looking, and an hour away from the lot refills your thirty-minute budget. THE FLOCKS Flocks fly across your screen during the thirty-minute interval of accessing gated sites as a reminder of time spent. At fifteen minutes: birds by day, drifting blue fireflies after dark, carrying a note worth reading. At twenty-seven: a heavier flock, and plain notice that the tabs will close. At thirty: the heaviest of the three — and then every tab on every gated site closes, not just the one that spent the budget. If your system asks for reduced motion the flocks stay grounded, but the notices still arrive and the close still means it. WHAT AD ASTRA CHANGES IN A NUTSHELL It replaces your new tab page with the clearing. On your first new tab Chrome asks whether to keep it: Choose “Keep it.” (“Change it back” switches the extension off; chrome://extensions turns it back on.) A small script runs on pages you visit, so that time on gated sites can be counted. The gated list is yours to edit, so it can't know in advance which pages those are. On any other page it does nothing. It reads no page content. A guided walkthrough runs once on your first new tab, and both it and the illustrated guide stay reachable from the popup. PRIVACY, IN ONE PARAGRAPH Everything stays on your machine. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no network requests of its own; the new tab's search box is an ordinary Google search, a page you navigate to like any other, and nothing you type there is kept. Your sites list, notes, and tasks live in local browser storage and die with the extension if you uninstall it. Full policy at the link on this listing. Anyone who really wants around the gate can remove the website from the gated list. That's deliberate. Ad Astra is friction, not a lock.