Featured Writing — Ultra-Normal
Essays and founder stories from Ultra-Normal. The ideas, research, and personal experiences behind the apps.
Educational / Professional
By Justin Neuman. Every minute, American consumers lose about $23,800 to fraud. In 2024, reported losses hit $12.5 billion. Smart people don't fall for scams because they're dumb. They fall because the moment moves faster than the mind. BiasProof is mind-armour.
By Justin Neuman. We are living in fast times with slow minds. Most failures of understanding are failures of scale. FractalView is a thinking environment that helps people move deliberately between orders of magnitude without losing coherence.
Creative / Wellness
By Justin Neuman. Over the last decade, "happiness" became one of higher education's most overproduced subjects. Real life is not dessert. HappyHumanist offers a course and a practice grounded in classical philosophy and the cultivation that presumes tomorrow.
By Justin Neuman. I started learning to code because I wanted to build this app. Not because I saw a market opportunity. Because I wanted something that didn't exist. A place to catch the small moments that make a life feel like a life.
Games / Play
By Justin Neuman. Jonathan Haidt is right. Phones are rewiring childhood. But the fix isn't fewer screens. It's better apps, and using them together with our kids. That's why I built PassTheStory.
By Justin Neuman. If you're in the ultra-running or backpacking worlds, you probably know the Pemigewasset Loop. Now you can live the misery — and laugh at it — without leaving the couch.
Back to Ultra-Normal
Ultra-Normal — Site Navigation Educational / Professional Apps BiasProof — Master your biology. Battle your urges. Never get played. A cognitive bias training app that gamifies mental calibration—addressing cognitive biases, emotional traps, and online scams.EssayVelocity — Rocket fuel for the college application process. Speed with direction. Momentum with meaning. No AI that gets you flagged. No private tutors that break the bank.ReadingVelocity — Uses the logic of endurance athletics to build attention span and reading speed. Pre-reading, active reading, and post-reading—three skill sets for sustained, timed immersion.WritingVelocity — Speed with Direction. Momentum with Meaning.Schrödinger's Box — Once a day, the app presents a single paradox, ethical dilemma, or thought experiment drawn from philosophy, science, and moral reasoning. You must choose. There is no neutral option, no skipping, and no undo.IdeaAddiction — One intellectually devastating fact per day—strange, true, rigorously sourced, designed to rewire how you see the world. The tone is bratty and self-aware. The content is deadly serious.FractalView — An imagination tool that makes jumping orders of magnitude intuitive.QuoteCrush — Pick ONE writer to crush on forever. Every morning, QuoteCrush slides into your phone with a fresh, fan-curated quote from your author-crush.Creative / Wellness Apps BreathCube — A breathing exercise built on Minimal Viable Design. A white 3D cube floats in black space, rotating to reveal breathing instructions on each face. The cube's physical rotation creates a meditative rhythm.UnicornKick — Most people live smaller than they have to. The marathon never gets run. The album never gets recorded. Unicorn Kick closes the gap between who you are and who you could become.Clearing Meditations — A mindfulness app offering desk-bound users genuine encounters with specific natural entities and phenomena. Every session focuses on a real, specific thing—never generic ambience. Ready to enter the Clearing?Ephemerality — A private digital sanctuary for noticing and preserving what makes you feel alive. Not social media. Not a gamified gratitude journal. A quiet, beautiful space to capture fleeting moments.LayerNote — The journal that never erases. Write your life again and again on the same board. The old layers stay underneath. You just keep making the next version stronger.Attunement — Most adults operate with a five-word emotional vocabulary. Emotional granularity—the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between feelings—is trainable. Begin your Attunement.HappyHumanist — Thriving isn't a feeling, it's a Practice. A daily practice for cultivating character, grounded in classical philosophy.WalkAway — Watches your AI tools, lets you literally walk away, and pings your phone the instant the job's done—or needs a 10-second nudge. You hit 'run,' you stand up, stretch, grab coffee, do yoga, breathe.Games / Play StoneWright — A contemplative building game. You have a pile of stones. You have a space to fill—a gap in a wall, a cairn to complete, an arch to span. You pick a stone, you place it, you see if it holds. The pile is finite but generous. There's no single solution. There's your solution.Dreamwood — Imagine your own world. Whisper its name. Grow your dream with a friend.BadMeditator — Zen games for people who can't sit still. Instead of guidance or goals, it offers simple, tactile experiences—stacking stones, raking sand, watching smoke drift—that quietly calm the mind through play. No streaks. No guilt. Just attention, trained badly.PopsicleBridge — Build stronger, learn faster. A focused, educational physics simulator designed for the classic popsicle-stick bridge competition. Prototype, test, and refine your designs digitally before ever touching a real stick or bottle of glue. Also available at popsiclestickbridge.com for computer users — even better for real STEM engineering.Sensorium — The first perceptual training app that treats your senses like muscles and turns feeling alive into a measurable, gamified, addictive skill.LandArt Studio — A nature craft studio for your iOS device. Choose a landscape—forest floor, beach, meadow, or mountaintop. Pick a season. Gather stones, leaves, twigs, shells, and petals from your forage pile. Arrange them into mandalas, cairns, spirals, or whatever emerges. No scores. No streaks. No timers. Just the quiet satisfaction of making something with what the world provides.PassTheStory — Transforms the phone from a consumption portal into a ritual object for collaborative storytelling. Parent and child open the app together. One speaks or types a single sentence. They pass the phone. The other adds the next sentence.Curling Chaos — A single-player, phone-first physics game where the only thing that really matters is how frantically you scrub your finger on the screen. The throw is simple. The sweeping is excessive, physical, and slightly embarrassing.Trail Torment — Experience the magic and the misery of Ultramarathon racing in Trail Torment. Take on the legendary 32-mile Pemigewasset Loop in the White Mountains. You've got this!Related Sites Red Pencil Editor — Want to use the power of AI without plagiarizing your papers? Red Pencil Editor gives you feedback without doing your thinking for you.Academic Velocity — Accelerating academic success with tools and resources for students and educators.ApplicationVelocity — Navigate private school applications with confidence. Expert guidance for day school and boarding school parent statements.My AI Distillery — A free, downloadable tool for teaching your AI about you.