Author Archives: Commander Zero

Book – The Dog Stars

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A month or so back a generous reader sent me a book off Amazon. Specifically: here

I’ll tell you right off the bat, if you’re a fan of action-packed post-apocalyptic fiction that’s pretty much one gun battle after another with no real attention to character motivation and development….you’re not gonna like this book at all. And, admittedly, the style of writing can be very detracting with it’s first-person stream-of-consciousness style. But…if you get past that, its a good story (in my opinion). Succinctly, it’s about a guy who survives a kills-99%-of-everyone plague and is living quietly at an abandoned airport, flying his plane, fishing with his dog, and dealing with the tremendous grief and loneliness that comes from all the loss he has experienced. Eventually the opportunity arises to not be alone anymore but the risks are high..emotionally and physically. A lot of people will say this isn’t a very enjoyable read because all it talks about it feelings, loss, pain, hope, and questioning. Fair enough…but thats going to be part of living through an apocalypse as well.

It was a difficult read, what with its sometimes-disjointed style, but it was relatable in terms of the character’s sense of grief, loss, and ennui. Its an interesting take about an aspect of post-apocalypse fiction that I have seldom seen explored in this much detail.

Anyway, I’d like to thank the generous person who sent me the book and if you have any other recommendations, please share them.

And, as long as we’re on the subject of gifties… if you’ve found this blog entertaining or otherwise worthy of your time, I invite you to kick in towards it… everything received goes towards bandwidth and laying the foundation for a post-apocalyptic empire that will provide a safe refuge for morally-challenged-but-creatively-fun coeds.

 

Just In Time II

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I have a ‘favorites’ list at one of my vendors websites. Its a list of things I want to buy when they eventually become ‘in stock’. I check that list several times a day. As of late, I have noticed that around 2-3am they are adding stock to their online inventory and it sells out almost instantly. But…sometimes I sneak one past the goalie and get lucky. Case in point:

When the inventory said they had a bunch of the Magpul Glock 27-rd 9mm mags on hand I didn’t even think about it – send ’em all. I’ve now got a big ammo can of these sitting in the Deep Sleep. And I have enough left over for my own personal needs, and a bunch to sell to hapless panic buyers that will, ideally, pay for the whole shebang.

MH shelf life

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‘Twas ‘generator day’ yesterday. Pulled the EU2000 outta storage, fired it up, plugged in the leaf blower, and spent an hour blowing leaves around. I try to run the generator every month but I’ve been a tad remiss about it.

Good thing I did it though, because I woke up this morning to a few inches of snow which means it’s less about leaf blowing and more about snow blowing today. (That’s a lot of blowing, I tell ya).

I’m trying very hard not to make every single post related to a) the election and b) guns. But, man, it’s tough. So, let’s just keep on keeping on with some of the things that have been going around here before this election.

Mountain House has been floating a survey around asking peoples opinions about lowering the shelf life on some of their products. Sounds like MH is going to become the New Coke of survival food. The reasoning, I suspect, is that if they offer ‘tiers’ of shelf life (Product line A is 15 year, Product line B is 30 year) it may open up pricing, packaging, and content opportunities that they can’t do with their present life span. I, of course, think this is a fabulously fatal idea. I’ve spent 40 years thinking of MH as the 800-pound gorilla of the ‘survival food’ industry and that was all predicated on their long shelf life. Of course, getting nay of the #10 cans out of MH is a bit of a fools errand right now. Fortunately, I covered that base years ago.

It’s interesting, come to think of it, that it’s only been in this year that I’ve had so many moments of ‘glad I stockpiled those…’ in regards to things.

Mitigation

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Nothing really changes until January 20 so think of it like getting three months warning that a meteor is going to hit the planet, or that a Category 12 hurricane is going to hit. You’ve got three months to try and get whatever it is that you think you won’t be able to get later down the line.

The nice thing about being a pessimist is that, worst case, things go exactly as you planned for. Thus, for me, I really don’t need to do anything…I’m just gilding the lily at this point.

As Kosh said, once the avalanche has started it is too late for the pebbles to vote. Or, to carry it in a different direction, you can’t change the fact that the meteor is going to hit in three months…what you can do is prepare for the consequences of that hit. In other words, stop bellyaching about the election and refocus on mitigating the results of it. While you’re frantically and self-righteously pounding your keyboard about election fraud, watermarked ballots, and more-votes-than-voters, the people who have moved past that are scooping up the things that you should be buying while you still can.

Predictions? Same as I’ve been saying since pretty much I turned on the lights and flipped the OPEN sign on this blog: mags, ARs, mags, ammo, mags, armour, mags, cryptogrpahy, mags, radio gear, mags, paperless guns, mags. I’ve also predicted that the markets are going to tumble on a Biden win…we’ll see how Monday goes.

Honestly, you should already have been at a point of resiliency in your life where the victor in this contest would have been irrelevant to you. Money in the bank, metals in the safe, guns on the wall, food in the basement, no debt in sight, ammo on the shelf, fuel in the tank, meds in the cabinet… you get all that squared away and it really won’t matter who wins the election.

Basement goals

G3 upgrade

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I have a handful of G3-style rifles. I got them because I wanted a proven .308 platform and because, at the time, magazines were less than $1.00 each. However, the G3 platform is a mixed bag. It has two tremendous advantages in its favor: brute ruggedness and no gas system to screw with. After that it has a couple disadvantages…one of the biggest is that the design of the gun makes mounting an optic very difficult. The problem isn’t as easy as simply slapping some pic rail on top of the receiver. No, see the problem is that the stock that is used has a length of pull that is a bit longer than it needs to be, and there’s a bit of a dogleg drop to the stock to bring your eyes into line with the iron sights atop the rifle. If you mount an optic, you have to literally give up your cheek weld to get your face high enough to see through the scope.

Gun Jesus, a long time hater of the G3 platform, made a video about a ‘modernization’ project he did to a G3-clone. Among other things, he made it left-handed-friendly, added an extended safety, changed the cocking handle out, got a trigger job, and most importantly swapped the stock for one made by the Swede firm of Spuhr.


I’d been wanting to add an optic to my pet PTR-GI rifle but did not want to have to go through the awkwardness of a bizarre cheek riser kludge. Gun Jesus’ experiments, and successful experiences, with modifying his gun prompted me to go ahead and drop a rather healthy chunk of change on what is essentially an M4 stock for the G3.

I ordered the stock from Mile High Shooting and, yes, it really did cost that much. Got the stock in about a week. It would have been nice to have an instructional video on the stock changeout, but the one-page printed instructions were adequate. There is virtually no way you are going to use iron sights on the rifle with this thing in place…you simply cannot get your face low enough to get a sight picture. But….your face sits perfectly where it needs to be to look through a LPVO or dot optic. Since I had a couple extra Leupold Patrol scopes and mounts sitting here, thats what I went with.

Loaded up some 150 gr. softpoints and went to the range. Recoil mitigation? Oh yes….the recoil is nowhere near what it normally is with the issue stock. The stock puts my face in the perfect position to acquire the scope quickly. First round off the magazine tended to print about an inch away from the others, but if you discount that it was turning in 1.5″ groups at 100 yards. Getting a trigger job probably would make a big difference. However, for going out and dropping the hammer on Bambi this thing should be just fine.

If you have a G3 pattern rifle, and you want to make it a bit more native to optics, this stock (if you can stomach the expense) is everything youre looking for. And since TPIWWP, here you go:

By the by, if I had to do it all over again I probably would just go with an AR-10 for the superior ergonomics. Magazines would have been several orders of magnitude more expensive, but I think that might have been a worthwhile tradeoff. One of the reasons I didn’t go with the AR-10 originally is because, at that time, there was no ‘standardized’ magazine…some outfits used modified FAL mags, some used modified M14 mags, some used proprietary mags, etc, etc. Nowadays it looks like thats all shaken out.

It approaches

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Regardless of the election results, you’ve got until January 20 until the current Presidential term expires. You’ve got a little over two months… ready, set, go! Here’s a reminder of what you might (or might not) be facing:

Guys, panic buying comes in four waves:

  1. Right before the election – “This idiot might win”
  2. Right after the election – “Crap, he won. I better get busy and buy…”
  3. Right before the inauguration – “That idiot takes office next week. I better buy…”
  4. Right after the inauguration – “Frak, he’s President now. I better buy while I can..”

This happens every four years. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

 

Equanimity

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If you ignore the election results (whenever they finally get around to finalizing them), there’s still plenty of other things to worry about. Don’t spend all day obsessively refreshing your browser to see what happened. There’s still a superflu, economic uncertainty, race-related disturbances, and the usual nonsense out there to prepare against.

As Frank Castle says…the battle may be over but the war goes on.

Just In Time

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These arrived today:

Thats a lot of 9mm Glock happysticks

Fifty of them will go into the Deep Sleep, a few will get stuffed in the bag with my PC Charger, a few will get cycled into the Bag O’ Tricks, and the rest will be sold at sphincter-numbing prices to panic-driven people who really should have seen the handwriting on the wall a long time ago and need to be reminded that there are consequences to waiting until the last minute.

Vote early, vote often

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No in-person voting here in my neck of he woods. I do not like that. I like ritual and routine, I like the standing in line, signing the forms, the little rickety privacy cubicle, etc. I cannot shake the feeling that vote-by-mail or absentee ballot is ripe for chicanery of the most vile kind. Yes, you could argue that the in-person voting methods are just as susceptible to fraud but it doesn’t feel like that to me nearly as much as this other method does.