To be disturbed by the "Prepping" board.

[TheoriginalLEM]

Is this a thing now?

Is there really a need to be stockpiling food, medicines and creating a bolt hole?

Am i missing something? Seriously (this is not a light-hearted thread), i suffer from anxiety and this is really disturbing me.

Hopefully people have just been watching too much walking dead.

I hope this thread doesn't get pulled, it's more entertaining than the Walking Dead at this point.

I'm particularly invested in the imaginary starving toddler. I reckon if he/she knocks on Dont's door they'll be OK to be honest. Don't will eventually feel bad, and sneak said child inside under cover of darkness (so the marauding hordes don't see), and the two of them will ride out the worst early days of the apocalypse. It might go on for a while, so just imagine a cool montage of eating beans, teaching the little'un to sharpen knives properly, eating beans, teaching the correct ratio of litres of water per water purification tab, eating beans, eating tinned vegetables, and eating some more beans (this time in the dark, with just a tiny wind up torch for light, to add variety).

The toddler grows up to be incredibly pragmatic, rational and patient- although admittedly lacking a few social skills due to hiding so much (and an aversion to beans, which will forever puzzle the inhabitants of the town said toddler has founded in an effort to restore order and civilisation to the plundered wastelands of our once green and fair Isles).

(I think I have created a nice example here of actual fantasizing, for those worried that Don't is desperate for the end of the world so she can add roasted toddler to her beans, or something.)

I agree Enjolrass, I'm loving the --barny- heated discussion. I have no idea what there is to complain about. quite a lot of complaints too apparently.

Oh bugger, sorry for strikethrough fail .

I dunno, Border. I'm trying to remember if Mad Max adopted a child protégé - wouldn't it cramp his style when battling the marauders after his tinned peas?

boarder

There is a series of books, the Kate Daniels series. Kate is essentially that child (albeit in an urban fantasy setting) including intense dislikes for certain foods that the grown up who took her in cooked all the time.

It's very similar

wouldn't it cramp his style when battling the marauders after his tinned peas?

Children are quite impressionable and easy to train!

My dd can literally kick my arse. We both do kick boxing and she has me beat everytime

well i certainly haven't made any mental health insinuations. Apart from my own that is.

i would like to say that i haven't called anyone a fruitloop nor insinuated that they are

feel a bit perplexed by the whole thing really

Is it ok thought that my image of Dont is now of a tina turner thunderdome type matriarch?

This thread gets sillier every time I click on it.

Tina Turner

' I'm trying to remember if Mad Max adopted a child protégé - wouldn't it cramp his style when battling the marauders after his tinned peas?'

Yes he did, except the child was armed with a lethal boomerang. Or when he was adopted as the god-figure by a tribe of feral children.
Don't worry about your children, I'm a teacher and I know that the majority of children would have no difficulty in mugging you for your last can of energy drink. They are survivors when left to their own devices.

No I DO understand that, which is why I don't discuss prepping with others. A neighbhour with a starving child, who knows that one of their neighbours is a prepper would be a very big threat to that prepper. They would ask for food and water, and then try stealing it if the request was denied, and would become violent. While it may be wrong to endanger the prepper by stealing from them, you can't really expect that a parent would take any other course of action, they would move mountains or die trying to save their kid.

I'm sure they could tell when you didn't start looking malnourished after a week or so. I mean, good health isn't exactly hard to miss. You'd have to become a hermit until they all either died or left. By that point they might be breaking into other people's houses anyway.

But I suppose if I had a starving child, I'd become nomadic and follow food and water sources until I found a make shift village to join.

Enjolrass Fuck. There goes my great NaNoWriMo idea

UnderTheGreenwoodTree Not at all! As somebody who preps a bit (admittedly not for the zombie apocalypse, I just live rural and am self employed, with clients who make a sodding hobby of not paying their invoices) I for one would welcome an army of highly trained, yet semi-feral toddlers on my side come the end of the world. Most people get stressed just seeing young kids board the same flight as them- imagine how off-putting a small horde of them would be! Our beans would be safe forever.

It's like a prepper's pension plan. I can't fend off all these zombies single-handed forever! (And they would look both cute and badass with their cutlasses* and shit)

*Because we're also pirates. My imagination, my rules.

Don't worry about your children, I'm a teacher and I know that the majority of children would have no difficulty in mugging you for your last can of energy drink. They are survivors when left to their own devices.

This. Kids are ruthless. I know I was. Get them on your side ASAP, before they go totally rogue.

They're already on my side, I have shiny stickers and glitter is part of my hoarded supplies when I'm prepping for Christmas.

I think Dont is a man - well, I got that distinct impression from the gun control thread. I'm liking the Tina Turner image though.

I think that the error of Dont's ways is the 'each man for himself' view. ITA with the pp's who said that survival is intrinsically linked to humans beings being able to co-operate, club together, basically stand together. Safety in numbers and all that.

I loved the post about the Nana making sure she looked out for her neighbours.

Still, planning for being snowed in for a few days is no bad thing. I do that - I wouldn't call myself a prepper though.

Ok - I'm joining the preppers if we can be pirates.

I had an army of small children once, they go through an incredible amount of wotsits and kit kats, it might not be worth the preppers stocks, otoh, when left to go feral armies of children are quite resourceful when it comes to finding new unlimited supplies of wotsits and kitkats, not so good on the fruit and veg front though.

There would be really no point prepping and surviving the end of the world if you couldn't at the very least be a pirate afterwards.

On a more serious note though (yawn) humans are co-operative beasts. We're hard-wired to form groups, sometimes even to our detriment (the good old 'us and them' and 'othering' that happens oh-so-easily). If zombies or pandemic or anything else did cause the world as we know it to end, then we'd want to group together and rebuild in the long run. However, I can envisage a short 'in-between' stage of chaos. It doesn't take that much to set off rioting and looters even now.

But as zombies as are unlikely as me having a mysterious uncle die and leave me his vast fortune I won't give it too much headspace. Finances, bad weather, power cuts, fire etc., are or could easily be immediate problems that I need to plan for.

AllOfTheCoffee I bet Wotsits have a good shelf life though? I'll pick up a multipack next time I'm able to get to a supermarket. Gotta be able to bribe the wee army somehow once the Ipads are all expensive door jams

THE OCADO WEBSITE SEEMS TO BE DOWN.

It's the end of days. Lock the doors and man the shot guns.
Who's got the key to the tins of corned beef?

I never thought of Ocardo shoppers as being the sort who would recognise corned beef as edible.

Good Lord, the website even has spam for sale. I'd rather eat my own boots that eat spam ever again.

Wondering if 'The Road' is inspiration for any preppers?