Alright story time, Rubylith: How I Cured My Insomnia With Masking Material

I was an insomniac as long as I've remembered. Had it real bad, medicated and everything. Slept through fire alarms. Lost jobs to lateness. After hours of tossing and turning and fretting over how little sleep I was gonna get and how tired I'd be the next day I'd give up and grab a book in hopes that it'd help me sleep; it'd quiet my mind down, but turning on a light would make my body all excited, because I'm part moth I guess.

Round about when people started taking smartphones to bed with them, all the "I've spent years researching the effects of artificial light on circadian rhythms" people started shouting OH MY GOD DON'T TAKE YOUR PHONE TO BED WITH YOU, and we all shouted back LOL I'M TAKING MY PHONE TO BED WITH ME WHO ARE YOU THE BED COPS and took our phones to bed with us, and that's when the midden REALLY hit the windmill.

"Blue light keeps you awake!" they shouted.
"Lol" we replied.
"No we mean it, it's REALLY bad!" they wheedled.
"Lmao" we explained.
"Look, even a SINGLE blue photon hitting your retina can WRECK your night's sleep! One photon! Just one!" they cajoled.
"Sorry, what was that," we guffawed, "I was busy buying an alarm clock with big blue LED numbers on it. And an iPod dock, because that is the style at this time."

Anyway I was already an insomniac so no difference I guess, I'll read me ebooks on me phone, fine. Does seem a bit bright though even on min brightness, tell you what, I'll set the text to like a dark grey on a black background. Cor this is a good book, I'm gonna read this until 4am or whenever my eyes start hurting.

YEARS pass without incident or difference until my mate takes me to a star party. A very dark place, lots of quietly-excitable blokes with glasses and laptops and they're all very eager to let you look through their telescopes and tell you stuff, a Generally Mild Fun Chill Time - but a very dark time, the sort of darkness where everybody's eyes are used to it, the sort of dark where if someone lights up a smoke everyone blinks and scowls and goes "ah" just at that tiny lighter flame. I peek over the shoulder of one of these star dudes and see an entirely-red Windows XP and say "Oh cool, you've cut the green and blue all together huh?"

He's like well, red light doesn't destroy your night vision, you can look right at a red light and still see in the dark afterwards.

I say, huh. And I remember that big old metal torch my dad got from the army/navy shop, the one where you could swap out the lens for a red one. And I notice he's got electrical tape over his hard drive and power lights too.

And I say so what'd you do, cut into the video cable and short some stuff to ground, he says nah and he peels back the corner of his screen and blinds me with Horrible Blue Light and as I'm blinking it away he says this is just a sheet of Rubylith, and if this were a film I'd have that moment in slow motion, "Rrrooooooo

beeeeeeeeeee

lllliitthhhhhhh"

~~~RUBYLITH~~~

A clingfilm-thin plastic sheet originally used in lithography and screen printing because it cuts so clean and nice, Rubylith is called Rubylith because it's Really Really Incredibly Red. Its Incredible Redness means that you can put a layer on top of a monitor and it'd turn your whites to an arterial pink and your brightest blue to the deepest inky indigo; another layer and the blue is black, it's gone, your whites are now deep blood reds. Your #ffffff is a #ff0000, there's Nothing But Red.

I must clarify, I'm not talking about sunset mode here, I'm not talking about tinting your screen amber - I'm talking MUCH further than that. Imagine a red heart shape made to look shiny with a white highlight; you wouldn't be able to see the highlight, it'd render the same colour as the rest of the heart. Hell, if the heart were against a white background you might not see the heart at all, because it takes red, green and blue to make white, and there's no green or blue. There's no pink in Rubylith land, there's no amber, there's no orange, red is red and white is red and pink is slightly dimmer red. Clouds are blood red against a black sky. This isn't your phone's eye-relief night mode, this is the complete eradication of two thirds of colour data and damn being able to determine what you're looking at.

Anyway, there was a bloke selling big sheets of Rubylith on eBay for a tenner.

(it's gone way up, he's asking $20 now)

Anyway I saw this astronomer and his Rubylith and I set my phone's ebook reader app (moon+ Reader if you're interested, I've tried literally dozens and it's still the best) to red text on a black background, and aye it looks like a goth's MySpace but it works, I'm getting sleepy as I read - until I get a notification or there's a picture mid-text and I get the DANGEROUS BLUE PHOTONS and I'm awake again.

Cut out a wee bit of this lovely red wonder material and slip it into my phone case at night, though, and we're sorted. I'm not worrying about how late I'm gonna be up, I'm just reading my Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson or Michael Marshall Smith or whoever, and half an hour later I'm getting sleepy, I'm having problems focusing, my mind's off in that pre-dream playground and I put my phone down and I'm off, I'm in the land of nod, I'm sleeping like a Functional Normal Person and it's absolute magic.

I'm constantly amazed at how well this works, and how I spent most of my life being perpetually late for things because No Sleep, before I put two and two together.

Now these days I use rooted phones where you can cut the green and blue with a one-tap widget on the home screen, but if you can't root your phone or you need to red-only an iPhone or a laptop or smth then Rubylith is WELL WORTH YOUR CONSIDERATION MY FRIEND.

I'm not saying it'll definitely 100% cure your insomnia like it did mine, but it's cheap as chips and 100% worth a try; worst that'll happen is it doesn't work and you've got some interesting crafting material that cuts really nice with an x-acto knife for the next time you wanna make a Christmas card or something.