I have been publishing daily for the last few months, but life caught up, and I took a few days off. I’ve been known to push through this kind of state and keep going, despite not having anything useful to say, just to maintain momentum, but decided not to this time.

There is a person in my life whom I have known for many, many years. He (he does go by he) is someone who has always been at family holidays, dinners, things like that. He’s a very, very nice person, and we get along well. He’s from the generation before me, and I’m Gen X. Recently, he started showing up at dinner with fingernails painted a very eye-catching shade of metallic blue, a very nice pair of earrings, and a silk scarf. I will call him Rob, although that isn’t his name.

I need to start by talking about St. Matthew’s Island. In the 1940s, reindeer were introduced to St. Matthew’s Island as an emergency food source for the people manning the observation station on the island. There was a lot of lichen on the island, the primary food source of reindeer. The humans didn’t stick around long after world war 2, but researchers did check on the reindeer population from time to time. Initially, they were thriving. Their population increased rapidly, and they were healthy. After some time, they had spread across the island in massive numbers. The lichen was getting thin on the ground. By the 1980s, there were no more reindeer on St. Matthew’s Island. They starved to death after eating everything that could sustain them.

In part 3, I talked a little about some horrifying possibilities, and I pointed out that those are part of the best-case scenario. This story is about how you can recognize that the collapse has started and know that it’s time to take action. It’s not a fun read, and if you are looking for something positive, maybe save this for later.

This part is all about how to survive. The skills I’m going to list are mostly things that are useful no matter what happens, but a lot of them are also way more useful if things fall apart (things are falling apart right now). I’m not going to go too deep into any of them. I have other stories about some of the specifics, and I’m working on more. Some are skills I have, others aren’t, but I recognize the value in them. I have definitely left off a number of skills that will also be useful, but these are just some starter ideas to think about.

If we can’t actually create an alternative energy source, what does life look like? What kind of places can we live in? There are a bunch of things we need to keep in mind. First, there are places that will be friendlier to humans in the future and places that will be less friendly, and they aren’t necessarily the same places as the ones we are dealing with at the moment. Second, we will be working with less energy, so we have to make an effort to fit in better with the environment, which is going to be changing pretty fast.

This is about peak oil, and what led us to it, and what will take the place of oil as we run lower and lower. Technology and Progress Let’s start with technology and why we use it. It’s to take the place of human labour, to allow us to achieve more while working less. Sometimes it’s a very simple tradeoff. A lever, for example. That allows us to be stronger, or rather to exert more force on an object than we could with our muscles alone.

This is the start of what is probably my most ambitious piece of non-fiction writing to date. It’s going to touch on several different of my Medium publications and NOTD streams. On Medium, I will cross-link, and on NOTD, I will duplicate as appropriate. The basics are that this is about how things aren’t business as usual, how this collapse isn’t going to look like previous ones, and where there isn’t a whole lot we can do other than mitigate the damage as best we can. I guess I need to start by explaining what money is, otherwise none of the rest of this will make much sense.

I'm not sure how much I still agree with this story, it's from a long time ago - but the idea about rejecting labels is still solid When I was young I knew a guy who decided that “gay-bashing” was fun. Most of us didn’t know that about him. He was sort of on the periphery of our group. By the time we found out there was no reason for any of us to do anything about it. He’d already received an appropriate reward for his efforts. He tried to beat up the same guy twice and the guy slammed his car into him. Nobody visited him in the hospital. I ran into him many, many years later. I didn’t know who he was. Once he introduced himself I made some noises and then moved away…

The phrase Strong Female Character has become a term of derision… and probably rightly. For the most part, writers who are creating Strong Female Characters are doing so with the intention of creating Strong Female Characters, which usually leads to creating underdeveloped characters.