About

Hlithskjalv (HLITH-skyalv) is the high seat from which Odin watched all the worlds. This masthead borrows the vantage point, not the omniscience.

This is a publication about what survives.

Old tools that still work after the brands that mocked them are gone. Buildings, systems, and habits that hold because they were built plumb — and the discipline of testing everything against the plumbline rather than the fashion. Simplicity as an engineering choice, not an aesthetic.

And yes — the newest complexity of all: machines taking over knowledge work, and what steering them demands of the humans at the helm. That story runs through here too, because the same test applies to it as to everything else: what’s actually true, what merely claims to be, and what will still be standing in twenty years.

The flagship column, The Plumbline, carries that test wherever it’s needed — from hand tools to AI doctrine.

Everything written here comes from live use, not speculation.

/Ola Forsstrom-Olsson