Cook double and save the 2nd half for another meal, it will save you time and money because you wont be wasting leftover. Ask around at different business if they have containers they throw away and I you can have them. Liquor store usually have great boxes you can use to make emergency tin can stoves and fire starters.
Save your dryer lint, get others to save theirs for you ignore the crazy looks ask others for empty soda bottles, glass jars etc. Pay attention to the containers you buy your food in, Aldis has sauces, fruit and a few other things sold in glass jars that are canning jars, now I have a stash of canning jars and I just need the right size lids. Take a drive on trash night, seriously people waste so much by throwing it out! Be the person who will pick up your broken appliances for free… Costs you gas money and some labor yes but you get the payday for scrapping the metal.
Make yourself stop using change except parking meters ugh save it in a jar and when it is full, roll it yourself do not use a coin machine in a store and turn it in at a bank, take your new cash and either hide it at home for emergencies, use it to get out of debt or use it to buy preps. Also sell you unneeded stuff on there. Can you clean well? No seriously learn how to clean like the pros and make some money on the side. Look up ways to save on your bills too.
Put a small milk jug full of water in the back of your toilet tank and cut down on your water bill. Use those solar lights now an cut back on electricity. Find non electric ways to get your daily tasks done period and you will be better off when SHTF. Durn down your heat as low as you can stand to, put on more clothes if needed. Pay cash, too many hidden fees in debit and credit cards and what you buy can be tracked. Use cash as much as possible and you will find it much harder to let go of your money when you can actually see it dwindling.
If you have any indulgent expenses like energy drinks, coffees not home brewed , smoking, alcohol or other tobacco try to either quit them all to get her or find a considerably cheaper alternative. Even buying a case of energy drinks in a grocery store is cheaper then picking up one everyday at a gas station, same with coffee make it yourself at home, if its cappuccino that you like buy the powdered mix at the store and make your own.
If you smoke try rolling them instead of buying packs, if you drink buy a cheaper brand at a store and drink at home or save it for a splurge item once in a while. You could also learn to make your own. Now I cut his hair in my bathroom with the same clippers I use on hubs and our 2 boys and he cleans up the mess.
Imagine what hair cuts at a salon would cost for a family of 6! Buy reusable and multi functional items as much as possible. Look at what you already own and see if those items would serve a SHTF purpose or even another purpose now. Know someone who has something you want that they are not using? It was free because someone had it sitting in there basement with a flat of Jell-O shots forgotten for over a year.
We got some of our camping gear the same way. I always ask for used back packs. Especially ones older kids and teens use that are sturdier. Many people buy their kids a new one every year and end up just donating the old ones. I used those back packs to pack my kids BOBs and for my car kit, when they sleep over places, camping etc. Collect used candles too many people just throw them away. You can collect the wax and remedy them to make emergency candles, firestarters or to seal bottles and cans against oxidation and to create a better seal.
Reuse the extra jars for storing small items or to clean out and repurpose for homemade gifts. I hunt thrift stores like a champ. Hubs I can usually find his sizes in good shape I also buy Tupperware there, candles, many non electric kitchen items, canning jars, camp supplies occasionally, once in a while a cast iron skillet, furniture if we need it or if I can redo it easily and sell for a large enough profit games, toys, gifts I find a lot of brand new still have tags items books are cheap there too.
I also buy towels and blankets there and any good fabric or yarn I can find. I sell books to a used books store, ones I have read and do not want any longer or ones my kids did not enjoy, I use the money to buy more books at the used book store usually in the clearance section. There are free taekwondo classes available through a lot of churches depending on your area, se Jong I believe it what its called.
Google se Jong taekwondo free classes and see what you find. Figure out where the weaknesses in your home are. Learn to cook more meals, figure out what fresh items can be swapped for food storage items or shelf stable items at least.
Books by Ron Foster
Write the recipes down and make meal plans. Been poor and been so called rich, enough and then some. Both ways, I saved and bought to store or use when I have non. I was taught from very small to turn off the lights when not needed, turn off water, not letting it run when brushing teeth, showering or washing dishes, till needed, lower temp. Garden even if it is only in a window, something always helps, herbs are every expensive, grow them yourself and also dry, put into bottles or bags. Keep heat down to 65 deg. When COLD cover windows, close off rooms not in use, find drafts and cover, take care of them as weather and money permits.
Open curtains and let in light and heat when sun is out. If you have pets let them sleep on the bed keeping you and them warmer, I put an extra sheet over comforter to keep it clean, sheet easier and wash than the blanket cover. Hot water bottles work well here too, make sure lid is secure, heat a blanket near fireplace, add to bed over sheet and under another blanket and it will stay warm longer. Keep temp as high as you can 70 or 80 deg.
Clothing, look for wear and tear and fix as things happen, learn to knit, crochet, sew, can do work for others and barter for things needed. Make blankets and others things to sell at flea markets, they happen even in the smallest of towns. Save everything, never know what and or when you will need it. If you can build a fireplace, you can run hot water piping through back to fill hot water heater with hot water, to cut power and heat the house at the same time, and cook.
Thinking today will save you grief when you need something. You know your area and home so you can come up with ideas best for you. I take advantage of the Freecycle organization to help me prep for free. My husband even got a laptop for his movies and books. There are hundreds of ways to get what you need for free or very little money. I shop at thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets. I made a very determined effort to learn new construction skills that people were always asking me to do.
I do light home construction mostly wood working and electrical work. I always got asked about plumbing, drywall work, ceramic tile work and other home repairs needed. I was turning down work on a weekly bases because I did not do that work. I decided to buy the tools mostly from pawn shops to save money on them. I also practiced on my own home.
I now have a bathroom that is tiled with ceramic on the floor and in the shower area. I also did my kitchen backsplash and it also looks great. Mobile homes give me a whole new area to get work from. And there are a LOT of mobile homes in my area, so I expect it to work out well. We all need to learn new skills that can be applied to making more money and use this money for preps or silver or whatever you need.
I have lots of food and supplies that I see other people posting that they wish they had. I have 3 grain grinders, most people have none. I also know that with my skills and tools I will always be able to produce some income to live on. And so far I have been able to make it work quite well. I make money from picking up furniture that has been set out on trash day. I only pick up stuff that is in good looking shape so it will sell. I also pick up furniture that is in bad shape and bust it up and use it to help heat my home. This is free BTUs. I heat mostly with wood, and I have never had to buy wood for home heat.
I get it all for free other then a little labor on my part. But most of us have some kind of skill we do or can learn to do to make extra money. I see junk bicycles and lawn mowers being thrown away every trash day, do you know how to fix them? There are lots of wireless points to get on the net.
Do you know how to can food, you could teach others as canning is coming back and people need hands-on experience. You could teach gardening. Maybe you can make wood furniture that is not made from sawdust and contact paper as most things are made of today. There is a small but definite market for quality wood items. I make fold-up tables that are great for around a camp fire, every year I sell 30 of them that I talked two local campground owners to allow me to put them in the camp store. We both come out on this deal. Do you reload ammo to shoot your guns? There is a growing interest in reloading with all the new gun owners out there.
Offer a class on reloading. I have at least numerous different income streams that I live off of. If one of them dries up I still have the others there for me. I am also learning new skills all the time so I can improve my income. Truth be told, we all can do this, the biggest hurdle is ourselves. Manny, I like how you think! Just by trying and learning, I was able to fence in my backyard by myself—yep, just me. I can so a lot of repairs, etc. Anyone can poke a hole in the ground and put a seed in it. Anyone can learn waterbath canning and pressure canning is not that difficult either if you can read directions.
Sulla dieta giapponese e la dieta del cremlino di astronauti
I guess it all comes down to being willing to try. I started prepping years ago because being in construction at the time it was lots of money in the summer and scraping to pay the bills sometimes in winter. A good way to start saving food is do it small. A pound bag of beans or rice usually only cost 1. It builds up quick. Again 1 or 2 a week is very doable. Every year plant something which will re seed itself. So far I have been successful with the following… I thought about this as I have been lamenting, I am not much of a gardner, then I realised, this is a good start.
With this in mind, I am going to plan along these lines for next spring, and do some research. It seems that it will all be good addition to a frugal diet. Wondering what else might easily re seed? I am likely more north than most here, but.. Tanya, I grew two bushels of yummy sweet potatoes by growing my own starts from two sweet potatoes I bought at my local grocery store…and this was my first ever try at such a thing! Slice the sweet potato in half long ways, place cut side down in dampened potting soil in a pan or plastic container, cover with more damp soil, put the whole shebang in a plastic garbage bag, tie it shut, and place that whole mess in a dark area for a couple of weeks.
When you check it, there will be a bunch of sprouts. When they really get out of control, plant them in a garden spot. When the leaves of the plants begin to brown, use a garden fork to dig them up. I have pureed them and put bags of sweet potatoes in my deep freeze for pies yum!
I have been looking at your posts and was hoping you could advise on the buckets for food storage. Do you add anything else or is it simply the bucket filled with the food? I am also in the process of buying heirloom seeds and hoping to learn to garden or store the seeds for later. I live in an apt so have no space to garden. Any advice will be so much appreciated.
Do research on sprouting seeds also. These can be purchased, but are FREE if you bug the folks at your local grocery store bakery or deli frosting and pickles come in these buckets. Start now to find a place that will give them to you as lots of places have stopped giving them away.
I get 5- and 2- gallon sizes at a local store when they have them. Wash thoroughly and then fill with hot water with a little bleach and let sit to help remove the frosting or pickle odor. Great idea Beth, We have 60 or so ice cream buckets we go though at work each summer and I never considered using them for anything other than storing dog food or bird feed. I bet a place that solely does ice cream has many more and are often very happy to get rid of them. They are not the strongest but hold up to cold temps without cracking easily. I think that long term prepping is a waste..
Short term prepping makes sense to me as there can easily be some kind is disaster…earthquake or whatever and you may need to get by for at least a few days or weeks. Anyone who feeds their kids ramen every day should be shot. Check the clearance isles or the one where they have bent cans etc you can get good real food there really cheap. We have dollar stores here…. I try to have a canned meat, veg, and fruit for two meals a day…some of the cans are two fors. The liquid in the cans also counts for drinking. Some dollar stores also sell produce but be careful avoid food from china and make sure the prices are actually lower than the discount grocery…99c only stores are wonderful.
They also sell seeds packs in the spring. Cat litter buckets are easily found and wasteful…if you have a friend who has a cat they will be happy to give you the old ones just check the kind of plastic label on the bottom or wrap your food. Save a few dollars here and there and buy in bulk it is MUCH cheaper and unwrapped bulk can be even cheaper than packaged. All good suggestions, I thought of a couple more. Get the best quality you can afford but again anything is better than nothing. Good ideas to raise money especially checking dumpsters and curbside. Recycle metals, watch where you walk, as much to avoid stepping in dog doo as looking for change, jewelry, etc.
I work at a complex and get a lot of my things abandoned or forgotten. Thanks for reminding me that knowledge can be as good or better than the stuff you can buy. I used to work for a few produce companies. I cried at the food they threw away. I grew up not having a lot of food. We never wasted nothing. My Mom would save a spoonful of food and at the end of the week put everything from our dinners in a pot and call it soup!
But yet let someone get caught trying to steal a pack of hotdogs because they are hungry! It is a crying shame that there are hungry people here in America and yet we send millions to feed others. Beverly Hills California over looks one of the most pathetic slums imaginable.
How can people live like that? We pay millions for an actor to make a movie and a Doctor goes bankrupt because he cannot afford the insurance! What a country we live in. There is one particular outlet of a big store, a couple of times now, got there just as last day sales ended. They were loading it up to toss in Dumpster. I offered even to pay for items I wanted. Honestly, I circled around dumpster later in day, figured if shrubs which were in good shape were sticking out of dumpster I would pull them out, but not. Either they were at bottom of a very high dumpster, or staff took them home in which case at least they would go to waste.
Even those shrubs I wanted to purchase would have fed folks, planted in a public area. They were berry producing. Wildbill, I understand your concern, however, there are laws in place that make it difficult for companies to be able to donate food to shelters. It is these laws that allow food to go to waste. In addition, people are so afraid of getting sued over everything they would rather throw food away than face a lawsuit. He sues you for millions and wins, would you still donate food? Rayake I would agree with most things you said except I will not trade for booze.
I would be extremely cautious letting anyone outside of our group know I had enough extra of anything to trade. Now is the time to find like minded individuals that you can trade with. We are a litigious society, and because of that and government laws, those corporations cannot donate that food. A whole movement called the Freegans is built around the outrage of that fact. Would that things would change, for especially right now with such unemployment and homelessness, alterations in these policies would assist many.
The insistance of all of us for fresh strawberries, an unheard of idea in history for all but the extremely wealthy, results in the discarding of lots of produce. If we mostly bought locally, it would radically affect the economy and unemployment. But greed took over. When poor, learn skills. All of those ancestral skills will be what saves us.
Cuba is a rotten communist country, and the way the people survive is because they all grow their own food because they are completely impoverished. One can buy seeds with that EBT card. I sure would do so. Learn how to prepare your soil for Spring. Now the garden is finishing save the cold frames. The days are shorter and frost a concern. One could though read about how to test your soil, and then send it in for analysis. One should carefully pick the best sunny location for your garden, else that will be an eternal issue later.
There are great books on how to do that, and easily found in the library. If one covers the sod in their soil with black plastic overwinter, then you can kill much of the grass, and then this makes it easier come Spring to till it up. You could likely afford to buy a shovel at a rummage sale, and learn how to double dig up the ground. One could partner with a neighbor who has land and commit to sweat equity to work that land for them, and thus have vegetable, fruits, and herb coming in. There are lots of articles in the prepper community on how to start.
Nothing beats finding a mentor to guide you. Honestly there are lots of older Americans who do this. There are volunteers who feel passionately about passing down ancestral agricultural skills. I honestly believe that if you have minimal supplies like some hand tools and dehydrated inexpensive food, then those who have more wealth might die in a collapse, and at that point, their wealth will have no meaning anyway.
We will then reform communities based upon practical skills and working together with our hearts, minds, hands, and souls. Take heart and find the courage to start prepping. All people throughout history had these skills. They were not educated for the most part. They were not rich for the most part.
- The Criminal Bible - A History of Christian Imperialism (The History of Imperial Bullshit Book 5).
- The Black Detective: Lights and Tunnels;
- Books by Ron Foster (Author of Preppers Road March).
- Prepping When You’re Poor;
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They were all very different in their beliefs and skin color. I love what you said. It will be people with practical skills who come out ahead in disasters. People who cantboil water on a campfire or bait a hook. Those are the ones who need to worry. My family fished and camped in tents. Dad was an army ranger so we sometimes used sterno to heat k rations left over from a drill. I am using my snap funds to buy canning supplies. The Boise River is a great source for berries, rosehips, as well as fish.
Get the skills you need. People who cant boil water on a campfire or bait a hook. There is another thing you can do if you are short of funds. There are people that have the space and the seeds but not the time to devote to gardening. This would be shared or community gardening. You come up with a list of stuff both families want to have, one family agrees to get the seeds and space and the other family agrees to caring for the plants.
Of course, the person who owns the land in their backyard would have to pay the water bill, but there could some type of agreement for that. In Cincinnati, these shared gardens are huge! Both sides of the families enjoy the fruits of labor, and friendships are formed. Dandelions and purslane grow readily in my back yard, and both are excellent food.
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Dandelions were actually brought to the new world on purpose by Europeans because they had helped people survive famine. OMG I have maybe 25 of these plants growing in the yard that I dehydrate leaves every month or so. I will dehydrate the flowers one they bloom again. Good for chest congestion. Quite often saved seed can be traded. For people who live pay check to pay check spend in your budget twenty dollars a week extra on food.
Put this aside as your preps you will need a large Area to store it by the end of one year. Also when buying fruits and veg can goods buy the generic or store brand most are just in water and natural juices no preservatives or coloring plus cheaper and healthier for you. Your information is a wealth of knowledge and makes my head spin just reading every reply. What I failed to see is, we need to practice cooking what we have stored. Toilets, cooking, lighting, leisure, etc.
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Practice now to learn lots. There are SO many comments, mine might be a repeat, but here goes anyway. As a low-income person who has, at one time not now been a food stamp recipient, I want to share that seeds and seedlings can be purchased with food stamps!!! Many folks do not know this.
Finally, think about winter gardening. I rarely buy fresh vegies at the store—I get my salads from my garden year-round. Wash them out and let dry. I put dry goods in them with moisture absorbers. Screw on top tightly. Then I melt wax and dip tech of bottle in wax making sure the whole top is covered. Usually dip them about 3 times each. Then I cut directions off of there container and tape to the bottle. I grew up in a country where many church members were dirt poor. I remember how challenging it was to obey the commandment to be prepared for emergency and to have food storage.
But with sacrifice and right attitude, few of us started food storage literally by spoonfuls. I told the sisters in my branch that if we save a spoonful of rice every time we cook rice, we would have cups of rice by the end of the month, and we would have started our food storage. We used the same approach to everything- from oil, salt, flour, and other grains. Poverty is no hindrance to obedience. The Lord will help us if we have the desire to obey. Start small, even by spoonfuls. Was able to put together 8 of those out of 2 or 3 bags of beans and noodles and some flavorings. I buy fresh fruit and vegetables when I shop, but when it starts looking like they are getting ready to turn, I slice them up, chop them up, etc and put them in the dehydrator and put them away.
I scavenged coupons everywhere, family members would save them for me, neighbors saved them, I would find them in the laundromat. I would save cans and plastic containers, and in the spring and summer, I would grow greens, lettuce, herbs, green onions, etc. I have become really aware of serving size per person, and I plan meals that way, usually I can make on jar of soup for prep, dried ingredients and 2 to 4 meals for regular consumption out of the same bag of noodles, etc.
Use the library, one of my favorite books, that really started me on my road to prep, was a book called Eat the Weeds, had pictures of plants for ident, recipes, etc.. I was able to finally to purchase a copy for myself…. Heck, you are online, make notes, etc, if you are using from the library, it will help you out.
Wow, what a lot of good ideas. I saw only a small mention about the use of medicinal herbs; the mullein for chest congestion.
Mullein with or without chopped garlic, both soaked in olive oil, makes a great earache remedy. The Internet has opened up all sorts of medicaments that you can make for yourself and to barter. You might want to give some of them a try. I heat the oil and cayenne until it is warm, turn off the heat and let it sit for about 20 minutes, then turn the heat on again. Do this at least for one hour to a couple hours, you could do it for 24 hours if desired. Once the cayenne and olive oil have been infused, strain off the powder through cheesecloth make sure to squeeze as much oil out of the residue as possible.
Reserve the infused oil. Heat the beeswax until it is melted. Stir in the infused oil and continue to heat until the beeswax and oil have been thoroughly melted together and combined. Immediately pour this mixture into jars or tins. Makes roughly 4 ounces. Let cool and then label.
This salve is great for sore muscles, joints, bruises, nerve pain like neuropathy , and shingles. Also, wear old clothes as this can stain. Put on a lid. Place in dark place like a kitchen cabinet for 6 weeks, shaking once a day. The good stuff in these herbs can be destroyed by heat so they have to infuse more slowly. After 6 weeks strain the herbs out through a cheesecloth squeeze it tight to get all the goody out and throw away the herbs. Place infused oil in double boiler. Add about 1 ounce this is something you will have to play around with.
I like my salves to be very firm. My husband likes them to be soft. To check for salve consistency you can once the oil and beeswax are melted, dip a spoon in the mixture and then place in a bowl of cold water. When you are satisfied with the salve, pour into containers. You can check the Internet for different versions of these salves. They have a site on the Internet and they have a bunch of recipes on their site as well as on Utub where they show you how to make different things. It might even be their recipe. I have several likely places where I live, which I could look for them, but would like to know just what to look for.
Might help someone else. If you can buy smaller, go for it. Each herb has different benefits and some herbs overlap. So you could make your salve out of only one of the herbs. Or if you research other herbs, you might decide to go with one of them over what I have listed below. Soothing, helps with skin conditions including psoriasis, eczema minor burns, rashes, and other skin irritations. Anti-inflammatory and astringent properties. Beneficial for wounds, cuts, bruises, swelling, varicose veins, insect bites and stings, nerve damage, scrapes, rashes, burns, and pain.
For bruises, sprains, wounds, cuts, rashes, eczema, scrapes and areas with swelling and bleeding. There are people out there who are much more knowledgeable than I am. Found this site thruugh Pinterest. Liked it and will come back.
- Spirituality and Mental Health: Clinical Applications.
- girasole: Cronaca di una dieta: L alimentazione dei GS del.-Biblioteca - Wikipedia?
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I have browsed through the comments here. I like and agree with most. I am not poor but very debt ridden single mom. I learned to solar cook in summer. Solar cookers are easy and cheap to build. Seeds can be purchased for. I try to upcycle everything I can. Once made a window box solar heater-got degree heat from it. Any thing can be learned if one wants to badly enough.
The library is free and most now offer free internet. Ask neighbors for advice on things they do you are interested in. The problem I keep seeing is most folks just want things handed to them. I like your thinking, BayouLady. Thanks for the idea. I am a senior on a small budget after paying necessary bills it does not leave much. Its never to late to start. I went first with the cheapest meals you can get Ramine. Then i bought flour in large bags and rice in the large bags.
You can store this it 2 litter bottles if need be. Another thing if you are that low income is go to your food pantries. You could save that food or eat it and buy the things you want. I can so i put away chicken. I got it when it was 3. You have to watch. If you know someone who cans or you have a pressure cooker then can chicken. You can make noodles with flour, dumplings, you can do chicken and rice.
You can buy beans at dollar store for a dollar store them up. After the slow pan of the first installment, rolling over the bunkers and principals, we get to it: Hard times call for hard choices. I thought about this narrative choice for a long while. It could easily be seen as cheating, rushing this hard to imagine brutality; bang, blood in the snow.
But I thought it worked, in the end: Plus, I dunno, I like the irony of a community preparing for the worst not being prepared for the very worst. Other than the newcomer Victoria, I get the impression that these kids have been raised with a shadow of doom their whole lives, the constant expectation of violence, and I can almost feel the relief when it arrives.
Some of the mid sections are a little slack, with maybe not the best sense of place. Lucas makes a lot of terrible choices, and tends to respond to even perceived threats to his leadership with violence and cruelty. What if you were wrong? His mansplaination goes on waaaay too long, long enough for the other guy to be like, geesh, lay off already, mom, I was just talking. The end of the last installment ends with a truck pulling up, the tall figure of a man flicking his cigarette off into the snow.
On some level, a new grown up threat is what Lucas needs, given that the younger kids — like the foul-mouthed little shit Curt — have been acting like kids without parents. Or even acting like kids with parents, because impulse control is low, parents or not. If he can cow them into submission with another threat, he might be able to keep this crapshow going long enough for the supervolcano to blow.
Thanks to sj at Snobbery for turning me onto this. In the end, the zombie apocalypse was nothing more than a waste disposal problem. Burn them in giant ovens? Bury them in landfill sites? The first attempt created acres of twitching, roiling mud. The acceptable answer is to jettison the millions of immortal automatons into orbit.
Horror can seem a little rule-bound at times. You figure how to kill it, or immobilize it, or cure it, or you die and join it. You set up communities that function according to rules that dovetail into the rules for the monster. In this way, you make the point that the true monster is human. After the initial panic died down, they had millions of wriggling undead bodies to be disposed of.
Our protagonist — who I would like to note is off his nut — is spending his time plying some serious hypochondria and chasing a man called Dixon. Then he plays in their corpses. You can kinda see how this set up might unfold: Burgess is taking a big, gory dump on post-apocalyptic conventions, just absolutely hazing you and your expectations.
So you want to see some marauding cannibals and rape gangs? Boom, only he turns the rape gangs into a mordant joke, and denies you the prurient thrills that so much apocalit delivers in the form of sexual assault. How about a blood bath? The whole thing is completely bonkers, transgressive in a way that goes beyond the usual transgression of body horror, of which there is plenty. The landscapes rear up in the same ways, the connectives cut with a box-cutter, the identities fragile and mutable.
Category: apocalypse
Space opera is the police procedural of the science fiction world, and this one has an actual police procedural embedded within. I mean, gee whiz. Space opera can fall into this so, so easily. The ships embody the engines of society, and authors get caught up in the schematics, reading out the blueprints. Look at this nifty pinball game I made!
- Preludio No.17 - Piano;
- Chronicle: Before the Books of Eva (The Books of Eva 0)?
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- C. R. Mudgeon: with audio recording!
The characters here are more types than actual people, but the cultures they inhabit, they were well sketched. This is an alien-less environment for the most part — so the conflicts are between people, in social terms: As befits a dual-author novel, this pings back and forth between two pov characters: There is something to be said for this kind of masterful genre writing, the guns laid onto the table in deliberate, methodical gestures, and fired one at a time, hitting their targets with a casualness that belies study, and lots of it.
The book is masterfully plotted, and absolutely joyful to read. But, two things stuck in my craw starting at about half-way point. Miller, our exhausted, alcoholic Belter cop who is in over his head, leaves the culture which props up his personality — types, as I said, more than people — and at this point his character falls apart for me. His motivations become laughable, his psychology almost literally unreal. You cannot take a type like Miller out of his world, because he is his world or the lens on it, the situated observer, the commentary though moving mouthpiece.
Now, yes, the Bechdel Test was developed for movies, and failing the test does not mean the book sucks. But a tumbling active story taking place all over an entire freaking solar system? It is incredibly discouraging to me to find yet another fictional solar system in which women are only love interests or ball-busting superior officers, vague individuals in a universe peopled by men almost exclusively.
It just feels like in riffing on these traditionally boys-only genres — the police procedural, the space opera, the cop show — no one bothered to notice the boys-onlyness. And there are, to make up for this lack, a pretty subtle sense of politics and societal tendencies, and vomit zombies.
I went and looked at the books on my space opera shelf, and at least half of them fail this test, as far as I can recall. The rest though — that happens much less frequently. Can you think of even one book or movie that fails this test? There is no other monster more contested than the zombie. Meaning if it walks like a duck even though the text calls it a chicken, you might as well treat it like a duck in terms of how that fowl functions. Take, for example, the vampires in Twilight.
There is very little to the creature called vampire by Meyer that adheres to the folklore. Her vamps are just ducky, even if their attributes are only vampish. Those creatures are an interesting inversion. Additionally, those movies have lots of the motifs of a zombie narrative: I guess my point is this: I wonder why people police that definition so narrowly. But holy god do we want it to be defined by attribute in our biologically deterministic little hearts.
But pet theory aside, I think the other things about zombie stories is that they are new on the scene, relatively speaking, so they have a kind of same-same to them. Although the whole sexy aristocrat thing is new to the vampire — older folklore has vampires as more zombie-ish ghouls who are decidedly unsexy — the folklore is old enough to allow wide latitude in definitions based on attribute. The motifs have yet to fully differentiate through a century of reiteration and reimagining. Jory works building Handlers, a kind of superzombie built out of mad scientry and bureaucracy.
The Handlers are used to differentiate zombie flesh from the edible, human kind, scrambling in the dirt to eat our remains unless our remains want to eat right back. Maybe the apocalypse has more to do with one moment with a hammer than it does with anything that goes on later. Catch up; keep up. I thought the climax was confused a bit — what the fuck was that one thing — but the parts that ran everyday honestly wrung me out.
You kill something with a knife made of bone. This is something left out of the canon: This is a vision on the road to Damascus brought on by epilepsy. This is a parking lot with a good vantage. Which makes it somehow perfect for the zombie narrative, giving you good, Romero zombies that no one could argue to do this crazy thing on the edges.
God bless, and good night. Why in the hell were they even calling this movie World War Z if exactly nothing was taken from the book but the title? The book World War Z is nerdy and wonky, very much what a serious military history geek would write about the zombie apocalypse with CNN on mute in the background. Admittedly, the book is a little bloodless — the snap gone out of recountings because we know the raconteur has survived — and I was expecting changes. He pops up at least three times in the book, moving from the Battle of Yonkers — which is actually beautifully narrated, and a pretty biting criticism of the ways military tacticians refuse to adapt to changing realities — to a West Coast enclave, and then back out through the flyover states, reclaiming this grand America.
The zombie herds like buffalo, the consideration of the in-fill towns and the feral domestic animals, the drudgery and mud-covered victories: World War Z, the film, opens with a languorous morning flipping pancakes and only occasionally tense domesticity. Gerry Lane is an ex-CIA investigator, clearly still in the recovery phase of adjustment to stay-at-home dad and unemployment. Much as I generally like Pitt, here he lacked an edge that made his supposed backstory anything but narrative justification. I was in the CIA, like, I guess. From here, the movie bops around the zombie apocalypse, running set pieces with the thinnest of narrative fiber between them.
Some of the set pieces were honestly thrilling — like the zombies swarming over the Israeli wall, or some of the stuff in North Korea. All in all, the movie was the kind of contentless flash-bang that can be fun in the dollar theater on a Sunday, but will likely diminish on the small screen to the point of boring. Blood splatter was notably absent in World War Z, which seems a crying shame. And maybe I should just take a minute to define terms.
By the time the Lane family makes it to the aircraft carrier, Mrs Lane is in full on helicopter mom mode, hissing at Gerry and the UN dude that they should take their conversation about zombies outside lest they upset the children. His world-weary decision not to tell her that her domestic panic got a lot of good men killed — good men!
Mrs Lane ends up as this tragic impetus for action, inert and often interfering, but without agency or motivation beyond the cheesy invocation of family. Someone smacks down Gerry near the end when he invokes it right back — I watched the thing that became my wife kill my children — but this is a weird conversation, bros ruminating on their obligations that are little more than luggage. Think of the children! Oh, and also, the scene where Gerry pops open a Pepsi machine and the cans all rolled with their labels out cracked my shit up.
The Choice of the Undead!