Ma

# Ma 間 *Ma* is the Japanese idea of the meaningful pause — the space between things. A Firefox and Chrome extension that blocks distracting sites and shows you a Zen koan instead. Blocking takes one click. Unblocking is much harder. ## What it does - **Toolbar popup** — one button blocks the current site; a text field adds sites by hand. - **The gate** — every `unblock` runs a six-step gauntlet: a confirmation, a written justification (25+ chars), a 15-second wait, a shuffled-button question, an exact-phrase retype, and a final 10-second countdown. Closing the popup at any point resets it to gate 1. - **The zen page** — a blocked navigation redirects to a full-screen koan over a blurred, slowly drifting landscape. 47 koans, each attributed to a named person, and 8 pale palettes (river, cedar forest, mountain mist, still water, bamboo, first snow, rice paper, moss garden), picked at random and never repeating twice in a row. Subdomains of a blocked host are blocked too (`old.reddit.com` follows `reddit.com`), as are trailing-dot FQDNs (`reddit.com.`) and Google Translate proxy URLs (`reddit-com.translate.goog`). **Private windows.** Firefox does not run extensions in private windows unless you say so, so until you enable it a private window is a one-click bypass. The popup warns you while it's off. Turn it on at `about:addons` → **Ma** → **Run in Private Windows: Allow**. Nothing leaves your machine. The only thing stored is the list of blocked hostnames, in local storage. The redirect passes the *hostname* only, never the path or query string, so nothing sensitive from a blocked URL ends up in your browsing history. The justification you type at gate 2 is checked for length and discarded — it is never saved.