Tag Archives: blogging

Last Blogger Standing II

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First off, for context, let me link to a five year old post: Last Blogger Standing

I’ve gotten a couple messages in the last few days from people noting that it seems like the number of preparedness blogs (or related material) seem to be dwindling.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful that are no longer around. The most sorely missed, by me anyway, was Self Sufficient Mountain Living which was my favorite. Claire Wolf has stepped back and semi-retired from her blog, Dakin shuffled off the non-corporeal plane as did a couple other folks. And some folks just up and disappeared, leaving their blog up with their last post being years ago.

At this point, and please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, I think the longevity title is between me and ,Rawles. As I’ve said before, I am most definitely not in this for the money, its more of a passion/vanity project for me. A little Amazon affiliate money shows up once in a while, and Patreon kicks in a few bucks a month, but other than that….nada. And that’s fine. I will say, however, that if you ever do think “Dang, he really nailed it on the head with that last post” please feel free to send me something in the mail or Patreon. I;ve even had people email me gift cards in the past. I’m not proud, I’ll happily take whatever renumeration you want to give.

In the last few years, I feel like my motivation has changed when it comes to this blog. More and more, I feel like my mission, such as it is, is to encourage and motivate the people who think like me, and to help bring people over to ‘my side’. Sort of a combination of morale officer and recruitment officer. To make sure that you know you’re not being ‘crazy’ or ‘weird’ when you buy three cases of TP at CostCo, bury a 10/22 in the woods, or map out ‘bug out routes’ from your AO. The world is on fire and people are telling you everything is fine. Anyone who doesn’t increase their resilience in the face of what we see on the news today is the crazy one.

I’ve no intention of leaving the blogosphere any time soon. Especially how, year after year, it seems we are getting into those ‘interesting times’. Why would I?

Of course, some things are out of my hands. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, have a widowmaker heart attack tonight, or die in another home invasion….who can say? Maybe one day I’ll wake up and just want to re-invent my whole life and that’ll include leaving the blog behind. Could happen. But, for now, I’m not planning on going anywhere.

So, yes…it does seem like the number of preparedness blogs is going down. But one other reason for that, and this might be a good thing, is that perparedness is becoming more mainstream and less niche…therefore it doesn’t need the ‘underground’ of blogs and websites (or, gong back really far,BBS’s and Usenet groups) that supported it back in the day.

Perhaps preparedness/survivalism is finally ‘out of the closet’ enough that the need for a handful of standard-bearers has passed. Certainly, it seems like its less fringe and more mainstream these days.

Regardless, I agree…it does seem that the presence of active preparedness blogs (that aren’t just shills for ad revenue) seems to be on the downward trend. But, your buddy Zero is here for now.

Can AI make a post for a survivalist blog?

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So with the rather suspiciously sudden appearance of consumer-grade AI theres been some talk about how it can be used to fab up term papers, reports, etc. Can it make a couple posts for a survivalist blog? Les find out. I found a ‘Blog Post Generator’ and throwing in the keyword ‘preparedness’ gave me this:

Title: The Key to Survival: The Power of Preparedness

Introduction (30 seconds):
In today’s unpredictable world, being prepared for unexpected situations has become essential. Whether it’s a natural disaster, a medical emergency, or even a sudden job loss, readiness empowers individuals to navigate through challenging circumstances with confidence and efficiency. In this blog post, we will delve into the significance of preparedness and discover how adopting a proactive approach can make a significant difference in our lives.

Body (2 minutes):
1. Understanding the Importance of Preparedness (30 seconds):
Life is full of uncertainties, hence being caught off guard at some point is inevitable. Preparedness involves arming ourselves with the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources to minimize the impact of unforeseen events. It enables us to respond effectively, reducing the potential risks and damages associated with emergencies.

2. Assessing Potential Risks and Creating a Plan (1 minute):
The first step towards preparedness is to identify potential risks in our environment, both natural and man-made. Researching local hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods can help us understand the probability of these events occurring and their potential impact on our lives. Once identified, we can create a comprehensive plan tailored to address each specific risk, including evacuation routes, emergency contacts, and essential supplies.

3. Building a Survival Kit (30 seconds):
A well-stocked survival kit serves as a lifeline during emergencies. It should include essentials such as non-perishable food, water, first aid supplies, flashlights, batteries, and a battery-powered radio. Regularly check and replenish these supplies to ensure they are up to date and readily available in times of crisis.

4. Developing Key Skills (30 seconds):
In addition to supplies, acquiring specific skills can significantly enhance preparedness. Learning basic first aid, CPR, fire safety, or even self-defense techniques can prove invaluable in emergency situations. Taking courses or attending workshops can help us develop these crucial skills and boost our confidence to handle any unforeseen events.

Conclusion (30 seconds):
Being prepared offers a sense of control and peace of mind when faced with uncertain circumstances. By recognizing potential risks, creating a plan, and building a survival kit, we invest in our own well-being and that of our loved ones. Developing vital skills further strengthens our ability to navigate through emergencies successfully. Remember, disaster strikes without warning. So, let’s embrace preparedness as a way of life – one that can make a significant difference when it matters most.

Note: The time mentioned for each section is approximate and may vary depending on the reading speed of the reader.

Thats not awful. Lets swap out ‘preparedness’ for ‘survivalist’ and see what we get.

Title: Venturing into the Survivalist Lifestyle: Embracing Self-Sufficiency and Resilience

Introduction:
In an increasingly uncertain world, there is a growing community of individuals who are proactively preparing for potential disasters, both natural and man-made. These individuals, known as survivalists, adopt a mindset and lifestyle focused on self-sufficiency and resilience. Today, we will explore the motivations behind embracing the survivalist lifestyle and discuss some practical tips for those considering this path.

Part 1: Understanding the Survivalist Mindset
The survivalist mindset is built upon the belief that unexpected emergencies can occur at any time, and being prepared for such situations is crucial. For survivalists, self-sufficiency and resilience are of utmost importance. They place great emphasis on having the necessary skills, knowledge, and resources to survive and thrive in the face of adversity.

Part 2: Motivations for Embracing Survivalism
1. Natural Disasters – Survivalists recognize the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters worldwide. They aim to protect themselves and their families by being prepared for these events.
2. Economic Uncertainty – Surges in inflation, financial crashes, and job losses have pushed some towards the survivalist lifestyle. They focus on being self-reliant and minimizing dependency on outside institutions.
3. Political Instability – Geopolitical unrest and social upheavals have also played a role in driving people towards survivalism. The aim is to be prepared for potential civil unrest, societal breakdown, or even government collapse, ensuring they can protect themselves and their loved ones.

Part 3: Practical Tips for Aspiring Survivalists
1. Stocking Essential Supplies – Survivalists prioritize storing food, water, and essential supplies to sustain themselves during emergencies. Building a well-rounded emergency kit is essential.
2. Learning Survival Skills – Skills such as first aid, fire-making, foraging, and self-defense are valued by survivalists. Learning and practicing these skills enables them to adapt and survive in various scenarios.
3. Developing a Network – Survivalists often form connections with like-minded individuals to share knowledge, resources, and support. Community support can be instrumental in overcoming challenges during crisis situations.
4. Sustainable Living Practices – Survivalists tend to embrace sustainable living practices, including gardening, composting, and alternative energy sources. These practices foster self-sufficiency and reduce dependence on external systems.

Conclusion:
While the survivalist lifestyle may be perceived as extreme by some, it offers a sense of security and preparedness in an unpredictable world. The motivations of survivalists stem from a genuine concern for their own well-being and that of their loved ones. By prioritizing self-sufficiency, honing survival skills, and building a strong network, individuals can embrace the survivalist mindset and be better prepared to face any challenges that come their way.

Holy crap,I think I might be out of a job. I’m starting to now wonder how many blogs I read are just AI generated affiliate projects.

It was 20 years ago today…

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Well, today is the twentieth anniversary of me thinking “Hmm, maybe I’ll start a survivalist blog”. And, lo, it came to pass…….

The original incarnation of the blog was on LiveJournal (remember them?), and then I grabbed a copy of PageMaker and made up a website. That lasted for only a few weeks until I decided to go with WordPress. And, since then, that’s what I’ve used.

It’s been a fabulously interesting twenty years as far as blog-related stuff goes.

First and foremost, I like to needle ,Rawles about how my blog predates his by a few years. However, in all fairness, his blog is updated every day whereas mine is usually every three days or so. It’s a good-natured rivalry that is silly because, hands down, he has the more informative and useful blog. But…I was in the space first. ;0

See, my blog was never about telling people how to prepare, or why to prepare, it was simply to tell how and why *I* was preparing. I make mistakes, and sometimes I have brilliant insights….hit-n-miss is pretty much how the posting goes around here.

I’ve met a few people in the preparedness and gunblog world. I’ve also been ’email friends’ with a few people in the industry. I’m very grateful for those experiences and have enjoyed meeting all of them. I try very hard not to name drop in this blog because of privacy, but I’ve met some of the ‘big names’ in blogging. Fine folks, every one of them.

Over twenty years, I’ve seen a lot of blogs come and go. The most fascinating was our good friend Harry over at Self-Sufficient Living. He went dark and deleted his blog a number of years ago and eventually stopped replying in email. Maybe he died, maybe he went to ground. Dunno. But he was a great guy to read and I enjoyed our communications. I’d love to catch up with him sometime.

Over twenty years you can see trends change and fall in and out of favor. This blog is older than the iPhone that many of you are reading this post on. When this blog started we were still in the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban era. Can you imagine? Neutered rifles and 10-rd magazines…the horror!

And, of course, over twenty years we have had all sorts of ‘this is it!’ moments as told to us by the media and people who had their tinfoil on too tightly. Just off the top of my head….SARS, Bird Flu, Avian Flue, Kung Flu, 2012, Fukishima, Ebola, Peak Oil, assorted earthquakes, etc, etc. Yet…..we’re still here.

It doesn’t take twenty years of thought to come up with “Stay safe, live within your means, be ready for a rainy day, plan ahead.” So, why have I been re-hashing the same stuff over and over? Well, its not always the same stuff…technology and toys change over time, new goodies come to market, etc. But, mostly, I’ve come to enjoy the routine and structure of blogging. And most importantly, I like that my interactions with people who read the blog remind me that maybe I’m not some outlier with a weird camo fetish…there are plenty of people out there who think the same way. Its a nice reminder that Im not alone in my beliefs and practices. Don’t underestimate how important that is.

What does the future hold? Beats me. My life is completely different than it was on Day One of the blog. Back then I had lotsa time and no money. Now its the other way around. Back then it was a big deal to spend $20 on batteries or a MagLite. Nowadays I routinely drop several hundred bucks every couple weeks on preparedness acquisitions (and way too many Ruger P95Dc’s). I’ll probably keep blogging until either the apocalypse actually happens or until I finally get my beloved Middle O’ Nowhere heavily fortified house. And even then i might not stop. Just can’t really say.

In the meantime, I’ll use this moment to shamelessly shill for myself – if you’ve enjoyed the last twenty years or twenty minutes of my posting, feel free to head over to Patreon and throw a little something my way. I promise it will go to a cause that would make Schumer and Feinstein fall down with a case of the vapors.

Thanks to everyone who reads the blog and I hope you all continue your work on making yourselves more resilient against what the future holds, no matter what that might be. We’ll see how many more years we can keep cranking out these posts.

Will blog for ammo

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A pleasant surprise today. A very thoughtful note, and lovely rectangle of green paper with a dead president on it, from a reader. They had some nice words of encouragement and, honestly, it’s always nice to have a couple bucks in hand to throw at the hosting service. So, to that very thoughtful individual, I thank you veddy much.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the ‘Donate money to the Bunker Equippage Fund’ button has been absent from the website for the last year or so. The reason is pretty simple – the folks at PayPal don’t take too kindly to people using their service to trade in evil rifle magazines. Thus, they sent me a lovely form letter saying that our relationship must, sadly, come to an end.

But…but…we can still be friends, right?

So what is a person to do if they are feeling generous and want to encourage yours truly to continue polluting the blogosphere with dry humour, NSFW innuendo, and real-time updates of a life lived with a major gun addiction? Not much, it seems.

Normally I put the arm on people for blog-related expenses once every couple years. I throw in some Amazon referral links form time to time to help defray costs, but pretty much any remuneration I receive for blogging is virtually nil. And I’m fine with that, I’m not blogging to pay my grocery bill…I’m blogging because I enjoy it and the Warholian 15-minutes it sometimes brings.

However……

Should you ever feel the spirit move you to do something nice for that guy in Montana who sometimes actually has a post that makes you go “Hmmm….I never thought of that”, and you’re at a loss for ideas, here are some options:

  • An Amazon gift card in email goes a long way towards giving me the ability to get gear to beat up and talk about. I used to keep an Amazon Wish List but it’s really quite a bit of work to update and maintain one, so if you wanna send the Zero some love head over to Amazon’s ‘send gift card via email’ section and send it to zero@commanderzero.com
  • Or, if you’re less about email and more about physical mail, just send something to the PO Box. The address is in the ‘Contact‘ page which is on the menu bar up top somewhere. Cash, silver, gold, mags, other gear, Jennifer Lawrence’s apartment keys, whatever…..

That’s pretty much all there is to say on that except… I very much appreciate the actions of those who, from time to time, send the Zero some tangible encouragement. Good on ya, mates! Thx!

Admin – Status report and AAR

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Its a middlin’-length sordid story, but for those who are interested, and for any bloggers who want to learn at my expense, here it is.

I originally started blogging on LiveJournal back around 2003. After a short time I decided to just get a website. My initial thought was to go with Yahoo since I figured they were huge enough that they’d be reliable and fast on their feet if there were problems. As it turns out, the opposite was true….big enough to not know what the other hand was doing, and big enough that there were layers and layers of “press 1 now” and “you are caller number…”.

For about ten years things were cool. The service was okay and the price was reasonable. Then there were a couple episodes this year that were just horrific. Most notably an unexplained and ill-defined problem that they took almost a month to track down. In that time the blog was virtually inaccessible. I don’t really make any money off the blog…I get a few bucks here and there from advertising, but it isn’t like having downtime puts a dent in my wallet. As a result, I was fairly willing to ride things out and wait for Yahoo to get their act together. But…while I don’t really make any coin off the blog I rather do like the interactions with people and being able to say the blog is one of the oldest preparedness blogs out there…so I did want to see things get straightened out quickly.

Pretty soon the choices were clear – migrate or perish. A blog migration can be either a piece of cake or it can be the internet equivalent of the Alamo. Whats involved? Well, three big things have to line up correctly: backup files from old website, establish new location and install those files there, repoint the domain name so that it goes from old.nameserver to new.nameserver.

Sounds easy, right? Well, I suppose it can be if you are disciplined enough to keep regular backups, remember registrar passwords, and generally keep a clean house. Sadly…that is not me.

For you bloggers, here’s how it went:

Install in my WordPress blog the Updraft plugin as my automatic backup system. Use it to create a backup of everything. Then, head over to Bluehost, sign up, install WP, and install Updraft plugin. Go into Updraft and upload the backup files to the new WP install. Run restore option. Discover that Updraft realizes that this is, in fact, not a restore at all but rather a migration. Demand $30 for migration software add on. Fork over $30. Run add on and start migration. Chew nails and watch status bar as you pray to science that this thing works and doesn’t start spewing error messages. “Migration Succesful!” Really? I dont believe it. ..:::look:::..hmmm….:::look:::…okay, that was worth $30. Then head over to the folks who handled my domain name and change nameservers. Wait for that to propagate. Get busy making finishing touches.

Soup to nuts, the migration, including software and contract with new host, came to about a hundred bucks. Honestly, I’d have paid more to not lose any more than has already been lost.

A new broom sweeps clean, but I will say that thus far I have been pleased with Bluehost. All the options and extra features are overwhelming (in a good way), but the customer support was good (and not based outta Calcutta…unless theres a Calcutta, Utah), and the rates, eventually, will be cheaper than what I was paying at Yahoo. Knock on wood but so far its looking promising.

If you run a WordPress blog I cannot emphasize to you enough how good Updraft is. I have it set to automatically backup everything once a week and dump the files to Dropbox. And I tested it thoroughly to make sure it does exactly that. And if you do wind up having to migrate your WP blog somewhere the migration addon really is worth the thirty bucks to get. this. crap. over. with.

Finally, I also have a plugin that crossposts to LiveJournal which is sort of a backup-of-last-resort and poor-mans-mirror. So if you ever come to www.commanderzero.com and the place looks like a train wreck, go hit http://commander-zero.livejournal.com/ and see if I posted about whats going on.

Barring any surprises, the website should be sitting here for the forseeable future. I still have to go figure out the emails, but it looks like for now you can go ahead and bookmark me and expect me to be there when you click it.

Oh…and skip Yahoo hosting if you can avoid it.

Admin – Is this thing done spinning yet?

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Crom as my witness, when the revolution gets here the asshats at Yahoo! web services/hosting/customer service are going to be the second group of mofos up against the wall.

Sitrep:

Dumped Yahoo! web hosting like a clingy girlfriend. Moved over to Bluehost. The migration was not as seamless as I would have hoped but I figured if I did it over the holidays maybe folks wouldnt notice.

I’ll have a much more detailed post about this nonsense later. Right now I have my fingers crossed that things are somewhat normalized around here. Loading issues should be greatly reduced or eliminated, and hopefully most folks won’t have any problems. I’m probably going to be quiet for a day or two as I climb around in here checking for leaks and whatnot.

FYI – this blog is kinda-sorta mirrored at http://commander-zero.livejournal.com/ …. If you come here and its a train wreck, check over there for a post regarding whats going on.