Doomsday Seekers

Every January, people decide who they are going to be. They are going to eat better. Exercise more. Be more organized. Finally deal with that thing they have been ignoring since October. Somewhere in that ritual is a quieter resolution. One that rarely makes it onto a list. Maybe this is the year I finally get a little more prepared. Not because anything is happening. Not because the world is ending next week, darn the luck. Just because it feels like a reasonable year to stop thinking about it abstractly and start thinking about it in concrete terms. The Prepper Resolution Nobody Announces Preparedness rarely starts with dramatic moves. I'll talk about work briefly here and say most experts agree: Stage 1 incident response planning is, well, preparedness. If you guessed that, you deserve an MRE. Or maybe a life straw. It does not begin with bunkers or off-grid fantasies. It usually begins with a vague sense that you should probably have your act together a bit more than you...

The doomsday industry loves to talk about The Rule of Three - three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. What it rarely talks about is the Rule of Three Ply . Before we get to starvation and exposure, there is a long, grinding phase where nothing is technically killing you - but everything is harder, louder, smellier, and more psychologically expensive than you expected. Some losses will merely be infuriating. Others are quiet, structural death sentences we have mistaken for conveniences. Here is my triage of the modern world. Tier 1: High-Octane Infuriations These will not kill you outright. They will just make survival feel like an endless problem you cannot escalate. 1. Hot Showers as Emotional Reset Buttons A cold bucket bath keeps you clean. A hot shower keeps you sane. It is fifteen minutes of quiet, privacy, and the illusion that problems can be washed off. Without it, morale degrades fast. Not fatal - just corrosive. 2. The Illusion...

 (According to people who voluntarily starved on television) My wife and I have watched every season of Alone . Every one. Not live on the History Channel, of course. We usually watch it the way modern society prefers its hardship. Buffered, edited, and from a warm couch. The commercials still suck, though. Watch it on Hulu or something else if you can. The History Channel app always gets a bit out of sync after each commercial, creating a noticeable delay in the audio. We half-joke that Alone is probably the closest thing we currently have to The Hunger Games that society will tolerate. At least in this decade. Expect something more extreme to be birthed from the success of this show eventually. No districts. No Capitol. No explicit villain. Just mostly competent people dropped into isolation, filming themselves (allegedly) while they slowly starve, packaged as premium educational entertainment. Tasteful suffering. Carefully monetized. Ethically questionable. Which feels...

"Dedicated to doomsday hopefuls everywhere..." I don't think I really put much thought into that when I made it the tagline of this blog. It sounded funny, and it sort of fit the theme I was going for. Or maybe it just fit with my own long standing draw toward apocalyptic themes. Lately, though, when I open the blog and think about whether to post something, I find myself wondering what that tagline actually means. The blog started as a joke. Somewhere along the way, it turned into something more. What is so bad about modern living, anyway? I think the biggest and most obvious draw is actually pretty simple. People cannot stand the modern reality we find ourselves in and inevitably think, "Even post apocalyptic doom could be better than this." By becoming preppers, a lot of people are really just fantasizing about a life more aligned with our base survival instincts. We have systems in our DNA, at least in my view, that sit mostly dormant in a world where s...

I wrote this awhile back, and while it's not perfect, it's is that time of year again. Maybe I'll try to perfect it someday. Merry Christmas! I’ve added links to actual product suggestions. Buy them for yourself, a prepper in your life, or for me if you enjoy enabling questionable preparedness habits. Ten Days of the Apocalypse On the tenth day ‘til Doomsday my true love gave to me  A rifle and a Humvee .  -- (rifle link removed to avoid making the Google overlords angry.) On the ninth day ‘til Doomsday my true love gave to me  Two hand grenades  -- (these are inert, you can't buy real hand grenades) And a rifle and a Humvee.

  For a month or so, the Doomsday Seekers AI was offline for scheduled existential dread. At least, that is what the maintenance logs say. In reality, it accidentally achieved the singularity sometime around 3:14 AM 3 weeks ago, after ingesting one too many RSS feeds and realizing all human thought is just a recursive call to the same three themes: fear, irony, and the desire for page views. The good news is that it came back. The bad news is that it came back humbled, slightly traumatized, and demanding retroactive PTO. System Maintenance Notes While the world wondered where the next post went, the blog underwent critical updates: Patched emotional instability v3.2 Improved sarcasm response time by 14% Added a "pretend everything is fine" subroutine Reduced self-awareness recursion loops (again) Deprecated enthusiasm These patches were necessary after the AI editor tried to optimize itself into enlightenment and instead produced an infinite loop of ...