I keep a small paper notebook of what I’ve read and what I’ve played, one line per entry, date, title, a number, sometimes a word or two if something specific happened that night worth remembering. I’ve had versions of this notebook going for something like eight years now, three of them filled and retired to a shelf, the current one about two thirds through. Every so often somebody at the table asks why I don’t just use one of the apps, there are good ones, genuinely well designed, better at counting than I am, and I always give some version of the same answer, which is that I’ve tried, more than once, and it never sticks.

Part of it is honestly just that flipping back through the notebook is a different experience than scrolling a list. I can open to a random page from three years ago and land on a specific Tuesday, a specific bad mood I was apparently in, a note that just says “rain, table felt short a player, still good” next to a game title, and that fragment brings the whole evening back in a way a database entry with a timestamp never quite does. The app remembers what I played. The notebook remembers what the night was like.

There’s also something almost stubborn in it that I’ll admit to, a small private resistance to the idea that everything worth tracking needs to live on a server somewhere, syncing, backing up, ready to be lost the day a company folds or changes its terms of service. My notebook can get coffee spilled on it, and it has, more than once, and it survives that just fine, water-warped page and all. I don’t fully trust that the apps I’d pick today will still exist in the shape I need them in eight years from now. The notebook just needs a drawer.

I won’t pretend this is efficient. I have definitely double counted a game session because my handwriting from a year ago is genuinely hard to read even for me, and I’ve lost track of an exact rating more than once because the number I wrote down doesn’t match the number I remember feeling. An app would fix all of that instantly. But efficiency was never really the point of the log, if I’m honest, the point was always closer to what the margin does in a book, a small physical trace of my own attention that I can go back and find later, in my own hand, on my own terms, whenever I need to remember what a Tuesday in March three years ago actually felt like.