Adam Osoba

The pact

Adam Osoba is a character. He has no passport, but his mishaps are real. What's told here happened: a missed bus in Chiang Mai, a bag that only opened from the top for three years, a keychain that stopped a fall of ten centimetres too many on a station staircase. Names, dates and settings are rearranged so the story holds together without exposing anyone else, but the experience behind every article is lived, not invented to fit a product brief.

This isn't a disclaimer buried in fine print. It sits here, up front, because a travel narrator who never says who he is asks for a trust he hasn't earned. Adam being a character doesn't make the gear worse or better than it is; it just means the voice telling you about it is a construction, while the miles and the broken zippers behind it are not.

Whatever Adam hasn't lived himself is flagged, without exception, by the evidence level shown at the top of every article: owned and used, handled without extended use, not tested but assessed on paper, or not tested but a synthesis of public feedback. Nothing is presented as a test that wasn't one, and an object that hasn't been handled is never illustrated with a photo suggesting otherwise. The full pact, the AI-generated images and how the affiliation works are on the transparency page.

What he carries

The bag has been 40 litres ever since the bigger previous one turned out to be mostly storage space for regrets. Inside: an electronics pouch that's shrunk year after year, a jacket that doubles as a plane blanket and a trail windbreaker, and a stash of compression bags that ended up replacing half the clothes they were meant to hold. Nothing gets in without first losing its spot to a lighter or more useful rival, tested in actual use and not just weighed in a shop, twice rather than once.

That constant sorting is the real substance of the logbook: most of the objects described here were first worn, broken, replaced or kept despite a known flaw, over more than one trip. What's still in the bag after several trips carries more weight, literally and otherwise, than what was just bought last week.

How he chooses

A retained object always has a precise, spelled-out reason, not a vague bundle of qualities. Ruled-out objects have one too, with their source when there is one: a measured flaw, a use case that doesn't match, a price that changes too often to compare seriously against a moving target. There's no top-ten list here, because a top-ten list is mostly proof that the first nine positions couldn't be settled on their own merits.

The full method, the five refusals that define it and what you get instead are detailed on the manifesto.

A published verdict isn't final: a last-reviewed date rides along with every article, and only moves when a fact has changed, never to artificially bump a page in search results. When a fact changes, the correction is published and listed, never slipped silently into the existing text.