The inventory starts before anything is open. No browser running, no address typed, nothing loading. What you have at that moment is a small pile of things you either brought with you or did not, and the whole of the first stage is a list of them.
Eight entries sit here. Four are records you wrote: a dated file of the published addresses, a separate copy of the one that answered for you last time, a surface to write on that outlives a crash, and a clock you have looked at with your own eyes rather than assumed. The other four are conditions: the browser copy on your disk, the machine underneath it, an hour that genuinely belongs to you, and an account you already hold on a second market.
None of this depends on an address answering
Everything in the stage sits on your side of the wire. That is deliberate. This site publishes three addresses and tests none of them. It does not know whether any of them responds today and it does not check. The only preparation worth writing down is preparation that holds regardless of what happens when you press enter.
A reader who turns up with a dated file, a clear hour and a browser copy they fetched themselves has room to move when an address goes quiet. A reader who turns up with a stale bookmark and fifteen minutes has one option, which is to hope. The gap between those two readers was decided days earlier, offline, by whether they bothered to hold anything.
Things, not steps
The full inventory is not a procedure. Nothing on this site tells you to do a thing in an order. Each page describes one object and asks a plain question about it: do you have this, right now, in a form you could point at? A page you can answer yes to is finished. A page you cannot answer yes to is the reason a later stage will go badly.
That framing matters most in this stage, because the first four entries look like habits rather than possessions. They are not habits. A dated file is a file. An hour is a block on a calendar or an evening with the door shut. A clock check is a glance that happened at a particular moment. If you cannot name when you last did it, you do not hold it.
How the pages are laid out
Every entry opens with the same six rows: what the thing is, how you get one, where to keep it, how it goes wrong, what fails without it, and roughly how long it takes to acquire. After that the prose is specific to the item. Some entries carry a tag reading Goes stale, which means the thing loses value on its own and has to be refreshed. Others read Keeps, which means once you have it you have it.
Five of the eight in this stage go stale. That is a higher share than any later stage, and it is the main thing to take away from stage one. Most of what you hold before you arrive rots quietly. The notes on dating things cover how to tell, and the current page is where the published addresses live if you want to start your own file from something.
Start with these four
And the other four
- A clock you have actually looked at - the glance is the item, and it expires sooner than people expect.
- Somewhere to write that survives a reboot - one chosen surface, settled while nothing is going on.
- An uninterrupted hour - held or not held, with nothing in between.
- A second market account that already exists - the registration, not the plan to register.
Where this stage ends
Stage one closes at the moment the browser opens. Everything after that belongs to the login stage, which deals with what you carry into an account, and then to the payment stage. The division is not tidy in real life, but it is useful on paper, because it stops you doing at midnight what you should have done on a Tuesday afternoon.
Questions that come up
Do I need all eight before anything else?
No, and the site does not pretend the world works that way. Most people acquire these out of order and discover the gaps by falling into them. The value of the list is that it names the gap after the fact, so the second attempt goes better than the first. Reading the stage through once and marking the entries you cannot honestly claim takes less time than one bad evening.
Why are so many of these things paperwork rather than software?
Because software problems announce themselves and record problems do not. A browser that will not start is obvious within seconds. A file of addresses you copied from somewhere eleven months ago looks exactly the same as a file you wrote yesterday, and it will keep looking fine right up to the point where it costs you an evening.