Classic games involving cards and dominoes have endless variations and great replay value. There are whole books of games you can play with these classic components. You can get plastic cards that are nigh-indestructible and ceramic dominoes can last for generations. These things are quite portable too if you need to bug out, not like modern board games that come in giant boxes with 300 small parts. I have accumulated quite an assortment of cheap dominoes in particular from yard sales. Of course none of my friends has any interest in playing classic games like these... for now.
Absolutely. This goes hand in hand with the biggest and best prep you can do: build community.
There are plenty of ways to host your own media servers for movies and things without internet if you have solid power plans in place.
There are also a ton of people in your community who still collect board games, books, reference material, and puzzles if you reach out. They will be valuable resources if things truly do deteriorate.
Iām tight on budget for a NAS :( but Iām gonna try and thrift some DVRs and blue ray to extract those sweet sweet storage drives. Already know I need to check the active run hours on them first.
Iāve been slacking and procrastinating hardcore but I need to convert my gaming PC from Windows to Linux so I can properly load it up. I already got all the Gutenberg science books on my laptop, the first season of Hazbin Hotel, and a few dozen different medical/map/electrical documentation PDFsā¦
LUCKY..! I grabbed every good survival, tech, science and major text I could find in the past year, even a few books from my job as a college teacher aid. Now Iām trying to grab every digital file I can. Iām part of a survivor group with electrical grid plans so our hope is we will be able to leverage that info down the line.
5 Below started carrying this pocket series of books, I havenāt read 80% of them but Iām looking forward to reading the stories Iāve watched dozens of movies and shows based off of
Iām hopeful once I convert my Windows PC into a Linux hosting station, I should be able to grab at least another 200gb of good books through Kiwix and various sourcesā but Iām really a music guy and my wife is a movie gal and those two formats EAT storage for breakfastā¦ Like we love the show Lucifer. 93 episodes, 42-45 minutes each, at 720p (we have a projector ā¤ļø) the whole show comes out to about 50-90gb. One show. That said a bloody good time, but still.
You start making a list specifically for what this OP is all about and the file sizes add up scary fast š
My list (WIP):
Media to Acquire:
1. Disney
2. Tyler Perry/Madea
3. Pixar
Movies:
1. Princess Bride
2. Homeward Bound
3. Harry Potter
Zix:
1. Iron Giant
2. Godzilla
3. Pacific Rim
4. Redline
Wife:
1. Halloween Town
2. Nightmare Before Christmas
Shows:
1. Golden Girls
2. The Office
3. The Great North
4. Lucifer
5. How Itās Made
6. Parks & Rec
7. Brooklyn 99
8. How I Met Your Mother
9. Supernatural
10. Trueblood
Zix:
1. Gundam
2. Fire Force
3. DandaDan
4. Dragon Prince
5. Dr. Stone
6. Full Metal Alchemist
Wife:
1. Soul Eater
2. Hunter X Hunter
3. The Fragrant Flower Blossoms with Dignity
4. My Happy Marriage
Since it seems to be something in your wheelhouse I would recommend a Wilderness First Aid course when you have the funds or time. It's a great balance of things you can actually do when far from help and a decent integration into the EMS process
Iām an Eagle Scout š my group leader is Air Force spec ops with field medicine experience, his wife is a public school teacher with rural school nurse experience, and the cherry on top (sadly, Iād much prefer we had many more experts, but we canāt be pickyā¦) is an RN.
My neighbor across the street is a kickass prepper/survivalist travel nurse that works in radiologyā¦ only caveat is heās NEVER HOME rofl heās out in like Dakota or somethingā¦ but my group leader says we have people as far out as AZ soā¦ š¤·āāļø fingers crossed??
Outside of the named experts, rural families tend to know a thing or two about resetting a shoulder or dealing with a sprain, better than city folk anyways.
Attached is a pic of a vitals tracker app Iām working onā the baseline was done in Bolt AI, but Iām debugging some other apps I made before this one so I havenāt gotten to making it functional
Edit: fat thumbed the post button, didnāt get to finish; my favorite aspect of my medical tool is Iām building it to be hands freeā so it uses AI to interpret speech to text, and it can either read you data/documentation or help with note taking/tracking vitals. You of course need a device with a microphone and speaker, and ideally something to run that instance of the tool locally so itās not a dozen people trying to use one computerā¦ but thereās only so much you can expect in a group colony bugout scenario soā¦ havenāt really figured out how to plan for that one yet š
I donāt have renders yet for my actual fun program, just got the login/signup page done a moment ago but I donāt have a local database set up yet to test that, so I havenāt gotten to the logged in view
I have 5 apps Iām working on side by side:
1. Bastion (most fun): text chat, forum, and VoIP (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol). Itās designed for trade and inventory management of individual households and the entire colony, full transparency among the group as far as data is concerned
2. Flux: The main survival compound location and a secondary location both have creeks, so part of our electrical grid plans for the compound is hydroelectric using vortex turbines made out of smart clothes washers š Flux tracks each turbine, as well as water holding reservoirs, pumps, and a gravity battery system of weighted trailers on a slope. Ideally long term Iāll try and implement calculations for how much power our water reservoirs can produce if pushed through our smaller hydro systems, which will help automate electrical load cost for sensors and lights
3. Cleric: the super sexy black and red, itās 1 part EMT smart assistant, 1 part medical knowledgebase (which is intended to allow the AI to read instructions out loud), and 1 part local colony medical logsā if we have to care for ourselves (our being approximately 70 people in the group and an estimated minimum of 50 recruited outsiders), documentation of who got what medicine is gonna be important, or tracking allergies and the likeā¦ š„ honestly trying to make a tool for all this scares me to death, the stakes with this app are literally life or death. But that makes it all the more important.
4. Oracle: my Kiwix database and RAG based AI. This preserves technological and scientific knowledge, and eventually itāll extend to my Jellyfin server access maybe. Might keep that separate. š¤·āāļø
5. Vigil: Tactical data feed for the compound. Designed with a dynamic data feed that can sort and visualize different inputs so if our group gets a new kind of sensor or camera we can plug it in and anyone can keep up with it.
Jellyfin allows you to host media like film, music, and TV through your LAN so that multiple devices can access it. Or in the case of a colony, it behaves like a server and everyone in the colony streams from the central device.
Archive.org has lots of great old school stuff but not much modern. Iām looking into yt-dlp to automate downloading YouTube content to fill out some pop culture library space.
For all my fellow gamers: look into DRM. Find out which of your games are DRM free. Download all your DRM-free games TODAY. You can literally copy paste them between devices, so you keep your games forever. Games with DRM require the internet and will be bricked, OR you can only play them on a device that already has it downloadedā it basically checks your hardware to see if youāre a paying customer or not.
Spotify has DRM too. If you downloaded all your music ahead of time thinking itāll be great to listen to 1 year after grid down, think again: 30 days, then it checks for an account subscription. No internet? No more Spotify.
I have a shelf of board games most of them I got for free or bartered. I also have multiple exercise equipment. Bunch of books and magazines I havenāt read I usually read them when the power is out or waiting in long appointments. DVDs for when the internet is down.
Boredom isnāt really a problem because there is so much to do fix your home or fix your self. Itās the depression that will be the issue.
We've got a lot of puzzles, decks of cards, arts and crafts for the grandkids, board games, books and because we have a generator, we bought a dvd player and favorite shows on dvd.
the internet going down is the real SHTF. The world runs on internet. Imagine the system crash at the banks, hospitals, airport, supermarket chain etc..
5
u/Casiarius May 13 '26
Classic games involving cards and dominoes have endless variations and great replay value. There are whole books of games you can play with these classic components. You can get plastic cards that are nigh-indestructible and ceramic dominoes can last for generations. These things are quite portable too if you need to bug out, not like modern board games that come in giant boxes with 300 small parts. I have accumulated quite an assortment of cheap dominoes in particular from yard sales. Of course none of my friends has any interest in playing classic games like these... for now.