#spaceweathernews guy just dropped a great little worksheet for planning for total global disaster, what to expect, what you need to do, what phases there are in the process. he also made a nice talk that walks through the sections of it.
i'm not gonna share to the public because i respect the work this guy does, but at the same time, in closer circles, those who get it, who never heard of the source, will get a share from me. in person, on paper.
it's a beautiful piece of work, and i'm looking forward to soon getting into it.
the trigger for me to talk about it though, just first giving the context, was the mention about decisionmaking and taking action, specifically relating to how to deal with stress.
for the people close to me who were a bit shocked at my "sudden" decision to head back to the mainland, and back to the part of it that i love the most, it's also my intended location to hunker down when shit goes sideways. literally.
the move has not been suddenly decided, it just got fast-tracked. the stresses of managing my current situation, in my current circumstances, was overwhelming me. my stress level was through the roof and i was borderline going crazy. the incident that caused github to shadowban (disappear) my github account, was precipitated by that ongoing, unresolved stress. i got into a long chat with claude about the details of a gravitational propulsion device i had conceived, based on the em-drive and its close relative, the ion drive.
ironically, in the end, what i came out with was something a lot similar to existing, real tech that is used in satellites and other orbital systems, to maintain either geosynchrony or altitude. just different in a few parts, like the propellant gas was oxygen, the tuning of the ion emitter (tesla coil) was specific to exploit the microwave band, in which there is the 60ghz which heats oxygen, which is like 20% of the atmosphere. so it can be used to superheat (and ionise) oxygen, which would cause it to acquire a lot more velocity than if it were just compressed and vented. and that "oh, this is more or less like something that exists" i was like. oh. i was hoping to bump into something more. my surface tension model of gravity, being an effect of a specific configuration of electrons.
there was other incidents in the last few weeks related to my weakening grip on myself, and that was the thing that ramped up to the point i felt the acute pain that demands action, and it was like, ok. i was already thinking in this direction, and achieving that long term goal may not be so productive or even successful, if i'm in a situation where my stress levels are constantly elevated, my sleep depth is low, and my body will start to show signs of immune system failure. things like i might get a herpes simplex on my lip, i might fall to a flu or cold, and so on.
this is vitally important stuff to understand about yourself. at what point, when the pressure is on, do you need to hit the eject button.
so, yeah, that's why i'm writing this.
but there was other factors too. it is an indeterminate amount of time, after my passport expires, maybe a month, and in that time i have no way to leave the island, except maybe if i like, stole a boat or something.
the other part is right now the sun has a big cluster of sunspots, three, grouped together horizontally. i don't think it's gonna pop off a killshot, or even minor broad scale power outage, but it could be minor, yet major enough to impact many aircraft in flight. i know that unless these failures are epic fused wires and such, the only thing then is that the plane has some level of manual control, ideally mechanical (fuck you airbus) and can glide until either the systems recover function, reboot, etc, or like the famous incident on the Hudson where a pilot successfully took the plane down onto the water, and iirc, nobody died.
as time goes on, the odds of being in a plane when that x-ray burst hits us 8 seconds later, that is what wipes out electronics. it causes computer memory to have bit flip errors, which can cause systems to crash, or worse, freeze.
so, to be honest, the sooner the better that if i need to go somewhere safer, that i can walk there, because, additionally, the only way to get there, could be by wind power, and tooling up to be a sailor is out of the question for me. i'm not young enough or strong enough to seriously consider it. so for me, it's a prority, to not be either in a place, or in a situation, where i don't have the means to travel away from where trouble is happening, triggered by power failures.
and another point he brings up i think is crucially important. where you move to, with it in mind that you want to be prepared to survive, you can't do it alone. you need to go where you can find, or already know, a reasonable number of people, of whom some of them will pay attention to this and join in the preparations, building a mutual support network, and to drill some of the time critical parts of the plan.
for me, the people who i have encountered across my time wandering through europe, who i think would be the best fit for me to be around, are the down to earth, hypercritical, and skeptical serbs. bulgarians are have too much "malicious compliance" and say things don't actually do it. bosnians are similar to serbs, but kinda a bit dumber. farmers, i guess, instead of engineers. hungarians, they are just weird, i like them, but having spent quite a lot of time in budapest. nah. slovakians, similar to hungarians, but a more familiar sounding language. australians and new zealanders, i'd prefer new zealanders, they are a bit more serious, australians don't really take anything that seriously, nor do they resist being manipulated. the english, well, lol. so soft and mushy and polite, that they will mostly not survive a weeks or longer power outage, at all, and only the migrants there now, who will reflexively form into gangs, will. oh, and the dutch... too stubborn and conservative. they might be better engineers, but unless they are actually sailors, forget it. that's what it will take around their parts.
the other thing is the regions that are good, and near me. i don't want to be flying for a long time, i hate planes, and the paring of weight and sound insulation, i walk out of a 5 hour flight in a 767 ears slightly ringing, like i was using machine tools for too long. so, from where i am now, that's the carpathian mountains, and that extends up from serbia's border with romania and the danube, the danube flows down and then east cutting romania and bulgaria from each other. then there is the romanian part, and that loops around to the west towards hungary, poland, slovakia, czech, and down towards austria. directly below it, but still at high altitude, is the region near the border of western bulgaria, which rises rapidly up to the border zone that cuts the two countries off from easy transport across them. the main routes from serbia to bulgaria are the danube and vidin, and then southeast of nis, the border crossing and main highway and train that links sofia and belgrade.
the part of the country i felt the most intensely connected to, and had some quite bizarre and epic vistas, one, was watching the sunset, and moonrise, on a full moon, with the mountains of the border towards bulgaria, and then the moon. and idk, tripped out a lot, because from that point on, the moon had trollface. i walked a long time in the night that night, and that silly face kept appearing on the moon for some reason. this is in the region southeast of belgrade, before you get to the area where the southern edge of the carpathians is found, and the three towns i know in the region, from visiting them previously or on that occasion, are Despotovac, sitting in the foothils at the edge of the plains, and then further south there is Rtanj, the town next to the famous sandstone "pyramid" mountain (which i think may actually be that, as i have climbed it, and i know it has many caves around it, and the other side further south, where i haven't been, is Sokobanja. i'm more or less thinking that is where. it's not as high altitude, maybe 600-800m, but the mountains of southern bosnia, and macedonia and the rhodopes range that splits bulgaria from greece, are very tall, and as i like to point out, the pivot point that is expected, is somewhere around the part of the mediterranean south of croatia, montenegro and bosnia, which is mostly croatia. the pivot point will have the least tidal motion, and in the region, the most dangerous part will be the greek volcano Santorini. so, being that these southern ranges mostly ring the region around Rtanj mountain, and are taller, i figure that i just need to position myself somewhere i am within two days walk of ground above about 800m, which there is, even the mountain Rtanj itself is 1585m tall, and much of the land nearby is 600-800m. so there will be many directions one can go, to get to ground high enough for the more moderate height the smaller, shallower mediterranean sea will be able to inundate.
that's my long range target, but the intermediate range target is being within the territory, where i will be organising my papers and building my networks.
when i was told that i would be able to probably be caretaker of a place in an area of the country i am familiar with, it was like.
ok, this is confirmed.
the circumstances have combined to provide me with a reason. if i stay, i could be maybe up to two months without any way to actually get off the island, or enter any other border. i can do that this coming week, and coincidentally, my flight stops in schiphol, where i can start the process of applying for at least an emergency passport. this solves the issue when i land in belgrade, about what i'm doing about my expiring passport. and then, the main embassy is there, it's the only dutch embassy in preferable high altitude regions of the balkans peninsula, it's close to where i am going next, and it is no problem for me to stay anywhere in the country nearby until that passport is issued. then i can move to the place where i am going.
so, long story short, it was not a sudden decision, it was that my stress blew out and i was not sure that i really want to be here, that giant sunspot cluster was a bit too much to see in the midst of this stress. by the time i am flying, it's going to be mostly out of range to do anything, so if it doesn't do anything nasty, i'm good, and likely am back on the ground and already in a better place than i am now, in almost every way that matters to me.
