Back in the saddle, although decidedly worse for wear. Posting forthcoming. Right after a trip to the local doc in the box. Ow.

Several people have emailed me over the last few months to suggest that I get a Patreon account in order that they may contribute to the literary dumpster fire that is my blog. So be it.

Usually Patreon is something where, by ‘subscribing’, or pledging a particular amount each month you unlock some sort of bonus. For example, if you pledge $1 a month you might get to read posts that are not normally available to folks who don’t pony up. Yeah…I’m not doing that.

Look, I’ve got 17 years worth of blogging posts here for you to read. Some good, some bad, some fluffy, some insightful. If you think it’s been enjoyable for you and become part of your routine, I think it would be awesome if you kicked in $2 a month to keep the lights on and the freeze-drieds flowing. But I really have no intention of creating tiers of postings for folks. I’m willing to live with the tragedy of the commons.

There’s a link at the top of the column on the right hand of your screen. I think what I’ll probably do is, on an experimental basis for now, post a footer in a random post once a week with a quick link. We’ll see if that doesn’t come across as too crass and self-serving.

Anyway, it’s there if you’re feeling particularly generous….although in this current economic clime, I may have picked the worst time in the world to set up this thing.

Someone very graciously sent me silver round in the mail the other day. Totally unexpected and, as always, very much appreciated.

And then, I received a .jpg in email of the back of an Amazon gift card with a note saying it was a gift for yours truly. Clever…an excellent way to preserve anonymity.

So, to both of those fine and generous people, I say thank you very much. When the radioactive debris settles and after a long day of hanging quislings I will, thanks to your largesse, have the resources to kick back and relax with a handful of grateful-yet-morally-challenged coeds from the university who will simply be glad to be safe from the roving hordes. Salut!

I was so wrapped up in the Current Situation that I overlooked something – two weeks ago was the 17th anniversary of this waste of electrons. Yes indeedy, 2003 is when I started blogging. I do believe that makes me one of theoldest preparedness blogs (although that definition may be suspect) still in business. In my time here I’ve seen a lot of blogs come and go. I’m still here ‘cuz….well…I’ve got nothing better to do.

In that time…Peak Oil, Bird Flu, H1N1, Ebola, SARS, Mayan calendar, Obama I, Obama II, and a host of other events. And..we’re still here. Which means either we are really good survivalists or we’ve just bee lucky so far. Honestly, Im more inclined to believe the latter.

Anyway, I realized this evening that I had overlooked the anniversary and figured I’d address that.

How many more years of this? Beats me. At least a few more years I suspect.

Not sure anyone has noticed, or cares, but obviously I have been posting more lately because of..well..you know. In care you’re curious, here’s how it usually works:

I write posts a day in advance. This is because enough happens throughout the day that if I posted as things occurred we’d have three or four posts in a day. I don’t want to do that – I want one post per day so each post gets the maximum exposure. So, I’ll write a post, add to it during the day, and then schedule it for the next day.

When? For the last few weeks new posts are queued to go up sometime between 0001and 0059 the next day. So, if you’re really jonesing, and you’re up late at night, the new post will be up sometime between midnight and 1am. Google Analytics shows me that most of you guys check in around 0600-0900,

Comments are greenlit and posted several times a day.

I check my website email once or twice a day.

So, barring some extraordinary event, it’s one post per day. If you show up at 7am and see a new post then you’ve probably seen all thats gonna be up for that day.

There you go…some behind-the-scenes insight for ya.

Travelling for the next few days so posting will resume around end of next week. Amuse yourselves by rolling back through 15 years of posts.

Blogging is not always horny groupies and lucrative product endorsements. Sometimes you have to deal with what could be generously described as ‘douchebags’. It used to be that the majority of them were ‘producers’ from hole-in-the-wall ‘production companies’ who somehow could never be bothered to have email addresses that were from real domains. They would say how they were developing a ‘survivalist’ reality show and blah, blah, blah. I haven’t gotten one of those in a couple years, so I suppose the trend finally died down.

However….I get emails from people every so often saying how they think the blog is terrific (although they can’t mention a single post they read on it) and how they’d love to submit a ‘guest post’. Usually this ‘guest post’ topic is only vaguely related to the normal content of the blog. So..whats the angle? Probably some sort of affiliate linkage on the ‘guest poster’s part or some other scheme. But what do I, as the blog owner, get out of it? Good question. So, when one of these parasites emailed me asking if they could do a guest post, I asked them about what was in it for me…

We’ll make up a name for our intrepid huckster…oh, lets call him ‘Danny Major’. Disco Danny sends me an email that contains this:

I have been reaching out to sites in the prepping and survival
> categories regarding the potential for offering guest posting
> opportunities. Unlike others who tout for guest posting opportunities
> I actually visit sites before I contact them and although I couldn’t
> find anything on COMMANDERZERO to suggest you accept guest posts I
> couldn’t find anything to say you don’t either, hence the ‘shot in the
> dark’ of the subject line!

My reply: Whats in it for me?

Danny Boy comes back with this: Hi, thanks for replying Commander Zero. What are you suggesting? Or is it a case of me misunderstanding your mirth and you are actually responding in the negative with a question?

Ok, let’s suss this out. I reply: I spend fifteen years working on a blog and you want to use that work and brand-building as a forum for your guest posting…thats great for you, but what do I get out of it that I can’t do myself? I’ve been posting for 15 years, I can come up with posts pretty easily. So, why would I let you post there? How does it benefit me?

If someone wants to advertise on the side of your building it would be reasonable to not give them that space for free, right? Surely Dan-O must recognize that. But….I get this non-answer: I fully understand any hard working siteowner being protective over their website. So thanks for taking the time to reply, and keep up the good work on commanderzero.com

Well, geez, thats not an answer. So: You havent answered the question. What are you providing to blog owners in exchange for the platform they are providing you?

At this point the novelty is wearing down. There’s a bit more back and forth and I tell him: Okay. I’d be happy to accept a guest post from you but I’ll need to strip it of any affiliate links.

And then…:::crickets::: silence.

It’s a pretty sleazy thing to do…you whip up a generic post that might fit the topics of a half dozen websites, load it with affiliate links, and then trot it over to some blogs to try and get the blogs owner to  post it so you can collect on the links. And the blog owner gets…nothing.

I’m telling ya, this blogging thing sometimes puts you in contact with some pretty weird and annoying people.

Nope..not dead. Nor in a FEMA camp somewhere. It’s tourist season in Montana which means entertaining people from outtastate. And…thats what I’ve been up to this last week.

We shall now return to our regularly unscheduled brain droppings.

Oh, and by the by, I actually had a couple people complain about the relative silence for the last week. Really? We’re all sovereign individuals here, guys. I have no obligation to anyone that I have not voluntarily undertaken to have. And, as I recall, I never undertook an obligation to post a particular amount of posts, within a particular period of time, to anyone.

So…beggars can’t be choosers. Some weeks you get four or five posts, some weeks you get two or three, and once in a while there’s a rare week of radio silence. In a world where preparedness blogs come and go after fairly short runs, barking at me over a weeks worth of silence kinda seems an ungrateful act considering I’ve been doing this longer than pretty much any other blog on the subject.

It is, approximately, the 15 year birthday of the blog today. Fifteen years is a long time. The natural impulse is to look back but there’s a lot in there I’d just as soon not dwell on. Oh, sure, good and bad….but but it’s never an even mix. People..good and bad, experiences…good and bad.

Initially the blog was simply a space on LiveJournal that I had for posting about preparedness. Then, for a very short while, I tried HTML’ing my own website that incorporated the blog. Then I switched to WordPress and it’s been that way ever since. While WordPress has been a pretty stable platform over the years (knock on wood), I cannot say as much about some of the hosting services I’ve used. (The moral of that story, by the way, is that if you have a blog that you’re fond of running….back that sucker up frequently.)

Originally, the blog wasn’t about disseminating preparedness info, rather it was about what I was doing in my life for my own preparedness. Notes to myself about things I needed to get, or my impressions of various gear and guns that I’d picked up. From day one, the blog was really just a sort of journal to keep track of my experiences and thoughts on preparedness. Things evolve and while it still is mostly about me and my efforts, there’s also a strong undercurrent of ‘hey, you should take a look at this.’

One fascinating aspect of having been doing this for this long is that I can glean interesting info..I can see how prices of things (as well as availability) have changed over time and, most importantly, how forecasts of things (gun laws, metals prices, political changes, etc.) have turned out. There aren’t many actual blogs on preparedness I’ve found that have the same length of time at it as I do. That’s not to say there aren’t any, just that I haven’t run across them. However, in the time the blog has been kicking around I have visited hundreds, if not thousands, of other preparedness blogs…some interesting, some not…some ran for quite a while, some disappeared quickly….but a few have had legs and are still around (and I read them daily). [Most notably ,Rawles’ SurvivalBlog which popped up about two years after I opened this place….I knew I should have registered that domain name!]

It’s been interesting to see how things have held up over time..for example, I have posts where I mention putting some food away for long term storage and then ten years later I have a post about opening it up and using it. Thats kind of a rare thing in the blogosphere.

Expenses? Well, I figure it’s been a couple grand for hosting, bandwidth, domain registration, etc, over the last fifteen years. Spread it out over 180 months and it doesn’t seem so painful, but when I look back on it as one lump sum..well…thats a few AR15’s that never were. (And if you’d like to kick in a few bucks for housekeeping expenses around the blog, there’s a link right here…

Every dollar you spend does not go to a starving child in Africa, a baby seal rescue organization, or to a GoFundMe for some kid with cancer. Instead it goes to a blogger in Montana who uses it to pay for website expenses, .223 ammo, freeze drieds, and lap dances from morally-challenged and financially-illiterate coeds. (Well, mostly the first three things.) Ah, but seriously….I try to not put the arm on folks more than once every several years. But, some folks want to help keep the lights on and I appreciate that greatly. Some folks take it up a notch and actually make a repeating monthly donation (sort of a subscription) and for that I’m really grateful. And thats the end of the infomercial part of todays post.

The advent of cool stuff in those fifteen years? First and foremost is the expiration of the assault weapons ban…that annoying bit of Clinton legacy that gave us things like this: Many of you are too young to remember, but there was a time when the M4gery you paid $600 for today brought $1500. And your $12 PMAG was worth about $50. Second mortgages were the order of the day if you wanted something like a Beta 100-rd drum. Fortunately that nonsense expired in 2004, one year after the blog opened for business.

Gas prices ran the gamut from $1.75 to darn near $4, silver bounced between $6 and near-$50, and we all somehow managed to make it past half a dozen end-of-the-world scenarios including but not limited to: 2012, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey, Peak Oil, Birld Flu, SARS, Ebola, Anthrax scares, and a few others that escaped me. Still no sign of Xenu, zombies, assorted religious returns, UN troops, alien overlords, or space Nazis.

Gunwise there have been some pretty forward movements…most notably the ‘arm brace’ fad, the somewhat-mainstreaming of the non-NFA 14″ not-a-shotguns, and the massive post-2016-election gun market slump that saw factory AR’s as low as $400 and AR mags cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. We also saw at least a half dozen panic buying episodes that we never really fully recovered from (if $15 bricks of Federal .22 are anything to go by. [or go buy]).

I suppose a very valid question is: how long can you keep blogging about a topic before you’ve exhausted every possible idea worthy of posting? Beats me…life has a bizarre way of throwing a curve ball (right at your head, usually) when you get to feeling complacent. I’ll keep blogging as long as I have internet and a pulse, I suppose. If the traffic dropped to near nothing I’d still blog…it’s something I really do for my own enjoyment rather than for the accolades and attention. (Although it’d be disingenuous for me to say that I haven’t enjoyed the very small level of notoriety that sometimes comes from these posts.) I suppose there’s never really a shortage of grass to graze on when it comes to preparedness topics. There will always be a hurricane, earthquake, riot, pandemic, or what have you, somewhere in the world that makes us re-examine the survivability of our existing systems.

Someday, though, I’d like to be able to make a post about how I’m sitting on the front porch of my little concrete hacienda out in boonies, watching the clouds drift by, listening to the creek, and occasionally popping off some ammo at whatever target of opportunity happens to pass by. Hey..it could happen.

At this point of introspection, the blogger would usually make some sort of comment like “I couldn’t have done it without you, the readers…and for that I am grateful.” Well, that sounds nice but it really isn’t true. Even if not a single person read this blog, it would still be here today and probably just as good (or bad) as it is now. But…the readers do make me enjoy blogging more than if it were just me yelling into the emptiness. So…theres that. I like to think that people who have hung around here a while have enjoyed the postings and in some way have felt a bit of a connection. That’s probably the biggest enjoyment I get from blogging – the connection. You see, back in the old days, before the interweb, we survivalists could very easily think that we were the only ones. We never really met other survivalists, or had a efficient way to communicate and meet  with other like-minded individuals, so it was very easy to think that you were unique and possibly a little weird in your outlook. Over the years, through the blog, I’ve had the immense satisfaction of encountering other people who had the same darn outlook.. and that sort of reinforcement is really useful at times. So…if nothing else, I hope I’ve helped to make some folks feel like they weren’t alone in their concerns and interests.

Thats about it, I guess. Back to our regularly scheduled brain droppings.