The Teachings of Disaster

Ah! Finally! I have been restored to civilization! I now have electricity again after 5 days. Internet access has also been restored! Now, from all this I want to tell you a few things I learned from my experience. 

1. There is no prep adequate when your Leaders have failed to establish a sound and reliable infrastructure in the case of disasters. We have no such leadership, nor have we for several decades now. No one should feel smug and safe that somehow natural disasters won't impact them harshly, nor that whatever preparations they have spent time and money making will actually be adequate when the infrastructure itself fails. You can please thank the Leadership for that fact. 

2. Fire-tech is really the most essential tech we have. Being able to see in the dark means you can move around in the cave at night. Without it ... holy crap, after the sun goes down, that's it. You're done. Plus ... it cooks food. Scares animals away. Warms the cave. I mean ... seriously. Fire is the actual high tech of our species. 

3. The mind is an amazing thing. When faced with an ice cold shower you can calm your mind, and enter it without flinching or cringing if you have the right state of mind. It took one ultra-cringy ice cold shower for me to get it together and calm my mind down about it. After the third day I could walk into the icy water and not flinch, but just take a normal shower. The hardest part was turning around for icy water on the back. But still, if you have the right state of mind, it becomes much easier to deal with. 

4. I do not need the internet, or advanced tech, nor does it need me. We spend a lot of time doing stuff in the Virtual World, and frankly, about 90% of that is a waste of our time. Not that without it we have anything better to do, really, but I am now aware that most of my time, generally speaking, is simply wasted on endeavors that produce no results. Elthos RPG is a good example. I spent 24 years working on it, and hardly a living soul in this world knows about it, cares about it, wants to use it, or has even ever heard of it. Of course, that is my fault in this sense - My priority has been to work on it as a game to be created, a technological problem to be solved, and a fun time to be had whiling away the days and years ... not as a business to make prosper. If I want to do that going forward I will need to completely change my orientation in regards to the project. I have a product and a service. What I do not have is a business. Note to self: next lifetime be sure to put a team together earlier in the timeline. This kind of thing can not be made to prosper by one person working alone. Also note: I found out that I can live just fine without Elthos. I don't need it existentially. It is simply a project I have worked on in order to bide my time and occupy my mind while the world collapses. I also wanted to leave a game system as my legacy to this world, and a print copy of the Elthos Rules would probably suffice after the apocalypse, so I think I have achieved that goal already. Mythos Machine, on the other hand, wouldn't survive a civilization collapse unless the Microsoft OS survived. And I suspect the rampaging hordes of Angry Techs will ensure that does not happen once the Great Collapse begins. Just a hunch on that one. But the Elthos RPG rules and one six-sided die is compact enough and simple enough to survive the dark age. I hope it does. The lesson I learned being: Do not be too attached the things of this world. They will not last. Pretty sure. 

Ok, those are my valuable life lessons that I learned from my experience. It's been a good experience.