The Prepper Thread

Gavinmad said:

Or gets murdered by me in the first 5 minutes. Cause that's my plan if I decide I want to try and survive a doomsday scenario, is to murder as many preppers as I can.

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Terrible plan and too much risk. Focus your efforts and tactics into just taking out one really good one and you are set. At least until someone else comes along.

Oldbased said:

Terrible plan and too much risk. Focus your efforts and tactics into just taking out one really good one and you are set. At least until someone else comes along.

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Nah I'm pretty sure that once I've murdered once I'll develop a hunger for it, and with society having broken down there would be very few targets with enough risk to satisfy that itch.

Gavinmad said:

Nah I'm pretty sure that once I've murdered once I'll develop a hunger for it, and with society having broken down there would be very few targets with enough risk to satisfy that itch.

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Just because you can kill families for their teenage daughters doesn't mean you should. Even in nuclear fallouts Gavin. Have some decency!

Eh. I live on an old farm from the 1800s. About three miles of forest between myself and the nearest paved road, which is then about 17 miles to the nearest major road. Bordered on three sides by state gamelands (500+ acres in two directions, only like 48 in the other).

Four wells, two with hand pumps, three are safe for human consumption, oldest one goes dry in a major drought, but the others are deep enough that it would have to be catastrophic.

I already grow more vegetables in a short season than my immediate family (4 people) can consume in an entire year when you take into account canning/root cellar storage. Potatoes, green beans, peppers, eggplants, kale/cabbage, cucumbers, zucchini, and sunflowers. Even have an old windmill (1970-ish) that used to be used to grind grain/seed, that can be put back up in a day or two of labor. Corn can be done, but it is a bitch that depends too much on a long summer, so I have never really bothered since my pops passed 15 years ago.

I keep a flock of chickens, a few turkeys, and usually a pair of heffers every other year. Supplemented with hunting (fowl, small game - except rabbit, deer, and bear), the only thing I tend to buy is pork - but with all of the hippies getting into this shit, I usually do trades at the farmer co-op or one of the numerous markets that pop up all the time. I buy a couple 50lbs bags of salt a few times a year. Have a few huge bins of staple carbs that we eat (beans, rice), cycle through them every few months.

I also have a 'bomb' shelter that was retrofitted in the 90s to 'prepare' for Y2K. Enough room for six people to survive for an extended period, access to two of the wells pumps, four different air filtration entrance points.

Most of this shit I inherited from my crazy grandfather, but I have kept it up, 'just to be safe'.

On the other hand, despite having 'lived' rough for the first 20 years of my life, I am so comfortable that I do not think I would want to survive an apocalypse. Could I? More than most. Would I want to? Unlikely. Would just keep on until my immediate family was safe or already gone.

Oldbased said:

Just because you can kill families for their teenage daughters doesn't mean you should. Even in nuclear fallouts Gavin. Have some decency!

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See now that just seems like a way to get intransigent slaves. You either coerce/threaten the father into selling his daughter so she feels betrayed, or you set up a beauty and the beast style stockholm syndrome situation.

Dehydration lasts longer, in theory, but (in my opinion) tastes significantly worse. The only thing I dehydrate is red meat for jerky or pemmican.

Canning is more expensive and if you do it wrong, more likely to kill you.

EDIT: Peppers. Herbs. I also dry those, but that is more for seasoning, not eating on their own.

Bah, what about the fiction!



EMP hits the country and shit starts falling apart almost immediately, pretty good.



Good but I think we'd have a bit more Mad Max. There's just too much stuff lying around.



Does the best job of anything explaining how a modern military could still manage to fail versus Romero style zombies. I don't buy it but I appreciate the effort and the whole thing is great. Max Brooks also wrote a comic called The Extinction Parade about vampires waking up and realizing all their food was dying.

Big Phoenix said:

Yeah you don't want to screw around with canning if you don't know what you are doing, instant botulism. Friend of mines dad got it from home canned food.

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Potentially dangerous but number of cases per year is tiny and user error contributed.

Arbitrary said:

Max Brooks also wrote a comic called The Extinction Parade about vampires waking up and realizing all their food was dying.

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There was a web comic from like 10 years ago+ that was based on that premise. Zombies kill most of mankind. Vampires make a truce with the last humans because they will starve if all the humans die, so humans begrudgingly allow them to feed from them in return for protection.

Arbitrary said:

Bah, what about the fiction!

EMP hits the country and shit starts falling apart almost immediately, pretty good.

Good but I think we'd have a bit more Mad Max. There's just too much stuff lying around.

Does the best job of anything explaining how a modern military could still manage to fail versus Romero style zombies. I don't buy it but I appreciate the effort and the whole thing is great. Max Brooks also wrote a comic called The Extinction Parade about vampires waking up and realizing all their food was dying.

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Relevant to this thread:


While not a total collapse of civilization, something like this is actually fairly likely to happen in our lifetimes.

Lanx said:

this sounds like an ethan hawke movie

edit, eh close enough
Daybreakers is a 2009 science-fiction action horror film written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig. The film takes place in a futuristic world overrun by vampires, and centers around a vampiric corporation which sets out to capture and farm the remaining humans while researching a substitute for human blood. Ethan Hawke plays vampire hematologist Edward Dalton, whose work is interrupted by human survivors led by former vampire "Elvis" (Willem Dafoe), who has a cure that can save the human species.

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that movie was so bad and the logic was brain dead lol. It sticks out in my mind because my GF dumped me a week later or so after I decided to see that in the theater alone while she went alone to watch some faux Irish romcom. I should have seen the romcom!!!