Travelling for the next few days so posting will resume around end of next week. Amuse yourselves by rolling back through 15 years of posts.

Blogging is not always horny groupies and lucrative product endorsements. Sometimes you have to deal with what could be generously described as ‘douchebags’. It used to be that the majority of them were ‘producers’ from hole-in-the-wall ‘production companies’ who somehow could never be bothered to have email addresses that were from real domains. They would say how they were developing a ‘survivalist’ reality show and blah, blah, blah. I haven’t gotten one of those in a couple years, so I suppose the trend finally died down.

However….I get emails from people every so often saying how they think the blog is terrific (although they can’t mention a single post they read on it) and how they’d love to submit a ‘guest post’. Usually this ‘guest post’ topic is only vaguely related to the normal content of the blog. So..whats the angle? Probably some sort of affiliate linkage on the ‘guest poster’s part or some other scheme. But what do I, as the blog owner, get out of it? Good question. So, when one of these parasites emailed me asking if they could do a guest post, I asked them about what was in it for me…

We’ll make up a name for our intrepid huckster…oh, lets call him ‘Danny Major’. Disco Danny sends me an email that contains this:

I have been reaching out to sites in the prepping and survival
> categories regarding the potential for offering guest posting
> opportunities. Unlike others who tout for guest posting opportunities
> I actually visit sites before I contact them and although I couldn’t
> find anything on COMMANDERZERO to suggest you accept guest posts I
> couldn’t find anything to say you don’t either, hence the ‘shot in the
> dark’ of the subject line!

My reply: Whats in it for me?

Danny Boy comes back with this: Hi, thanks for replying Commander Zero. What are you suggesting? Or is it a case of me misunderstanding your mirth and you are actually responding in the negative with a question?

Ok, let’s suss this out. I reply: I spend fifteen years working on a blog and you want to use that work and brand-building as a forum for your guest posting…thats great for you, but what do I get out of it that I can’t do myself? I’ve been posting for 15 years, I can come up with posts pretty easily. So, why would I let you post there? How does it benefit me?

If someone wants to advertise on the side of your building it would be reasonable to not give them that space for free, right? Surely Dan-O must recognize that. But….I get this non-answer: I fully understand any hard working siteowner being protective over their website. So thanks for taking the time to reply, and keep up the good work on commanderzero.com

Well, geez, thats not an answer. So: You havent answered the question. What are you providing to blog owners in exchange for the platform they are providing you?

At this point the novelty is wearing down. There’s a bit more back and forth and I tell him: Okay. I’d be happy to accept a guest post from you but I’ll need to strip it of any affiliate links.

And then…:::crickets::: silence.

It’s a pretty sleazy thing to do…you whip up a generic post that might fit the topics of a half dozen websites, load it with affiliate links, and then trot it over to some blogs to try and get the blogs owner to  post it so you can collect on the links. And the blog owner gets…nothing.

I’m telling ya, this blogging thing sometimes puts you in contact with some pretty weird and annoying people.

Nope..not dead. Nor in a FEMA camp somewhere. It’s tourist season in Montana which means entertaining people from outtastate. And…thats what I’ve been up to this last week.

We shall now return to our regularly unscheduled brain droppings.

Oh, and by the by, I actually had a couple people complain about the relative silence for the last week. Really? We’re all sovereign individuals here, guys. I have no obligation to anyone that I have not voluntarily undertaken to have. And, as I recall, I never undertook an obligation to post a particular amount of posts, within a particular period of time, to anyone.

So…beggars can’t be choosers. Some weeks you get four or five posts, some weeks you get two or three, and once in a while there’s a rare week of radio silence. In a world where preparedness blogs come and go after fairly short runs, barking at me over a weeks worth of silence kinda seems an ungrateful act considering I’ve been doing this longer than pretty much any other blog on the subject.

It is, approximately, the 15 year birthday of the blog today. Fifteen years is a long time. The natural impulse is to look back but there’s a lot in there I’d just as soon not dwell on. Oh, sure, good and bad….but but it’s never an even mix. People..good and bad, experiences…good and bad.

Initially the blog was simply a space on LiveJournal that I had for posting about preparedness. Then, for a very short while, I tried HTML’ing my own website that incorporated the blog. Then I switched to WordPress and it’s been that way ever since. While WordPress has been a pretty stable platform over the years (knock on wood), I cannot say as much about some of the hosting services I’ve used. (The moral of that story, by the way, is that if you have a blog that you’re fond of running….back that sucker up frequently.)

Originally, the blog wasn’t about disseminating preparedness info, rather it was about what I was doing in my life for my own preparedness. Notes to myself about things I needed to get, or my impressions of various gear and guns that I’d picked up. From day one, the blog was really just a sort of journal to keep track of my experiences and thoughts on preparedness. Things evolve and while it still is mostly about me and my efforts, there’s also a strong undercurrent of ‘hey, you should take a look at this.’

One fascinating aspect of having been doing this for this long is that I can glean interesting info..I can see how prices of things (as well as availability) have changed over time and, most importantly, how forecasts of things (gun laws, metals prices, political changes, etc.) have turned out. There aren’t many actual blogs on preparedness I’ve found that have the same length of time at it as I do. That’s not to say there aren’t any, just that I haven’t run across them. However, in the time the blog has been kicking around I have visited hundreds, if not thousands, of other preparedness blogs…some interesting, some not…some ran for quite a while, some disappeared quickly….but a few have had legs and are still around (and I read them daily). [Most notably ,Rawles’ SurvivalBlog which popped up about two years after I opened this place….I knew I should have registered that domain name!]

It’s been interesting to see how things have held up over time..for example, I have posts where I mention putting some food away for long term storage and then ten years later I have a post about opening it up and using it. Thats kind of a rare thing in the blogosphere.

Expenses? Well, I figure it’s been a couple grand for hosting, bandwidth, domain registration, etc, over the last fifteen years. Spread it out over 180 months and it doesn’t seem so painful, but when I look back on it as one lump sum..well…thats a few AR15’s that never were. (And if you’d like to kick in a few bucks for housekeeping expenses around the blog, there’s a link right here…

Every dollar you spend does not go to a starving child in Africa, a baby seal rescue organization, or to a GoFundMe for some kid with cancer. Instead it goes to a blogger in Montana who uses it to pay for website expenses, .223 ammo, freeze drieds, and lap dances from morally-challenged and financially-illiterate coeds. (Well, mostly the first three things.) Ah, but seriously….I try to not put the arm on folks more than once every several years. But, some folks want to help keep the lights on and I appreciate that greatly. Some folks take it up a notch and actually make a repeating monthly donation (sort of a subscription) and for that I’m really grateful. And thats the end of the infomercial part of todays post.

The advent of cool stuff in those fifteen years? First and foremost is the expiration of the assault weapons ban…that annoying bit of Clinton legacy that gave us things like this: Many of you are too young to remember, but there was a time when the M4gery you paid $600 for today brought $1500. And your $12 PMAG was worth about $50. Second mortgages were the order of the day if you wanted something like a Beta 100-rd drum. Fortunately that nonsense expired in 2004, one year after the blog opened for business.

Gas prices ran the gamut from $1.75 to darn near $4, silver bounced between $6 and near-$50, and we all somehow managed to make it past half a dozen end-of-the-world scenarios including but not limited to: 2012, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey, Peak Oil, Birld Flu, SARS, Ebola, Anthrax scares, and a few others that escaped me. Still no sign of Xenu, zombies, assorted religious returns, UN troops, alien overlords, or space Nazis.

Gunwise there have been some pretty forward movements…most notably the ‘arm brace’ fad, the somewhat-mainstreaming of the non-NFA 14″ not-a-shotguns, and the massive post-2016-election gun market slump that saw factory AR’s as low as $400 and AR mags cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. We also saw at least a half dozen panic buying episodes that we never really fully recovered from (if $15 bricks of Federal .22 are anything to go by. [or go buy]).

I suppose a very valid question is: how long can you keep blogging about a topic before you’ve exhausted every possible idea worthy of posting? Beats me…life has a bizarre way of throwing a curve ball (right at your head, usually) when you get to feeling complacent. I’ll keep blogging as long as I have internet and a pulse, I suppose. If the traffic dropped to near nothing I’d still blog…it’s something I really do for my own enjoyment rather than for the accolades and attention. (Although it’d be disingenuous for me to say that I haven’t enjoyed the very small level of notoriety that sometimes comes from these posts.) I suppose there’s never really a shortage of grass to graze on when it comes to preparedness topics. There will always be a hurricane, earthquake, riot, pandemic, or what have you, somewhere in the world that makes us re-examine the survivability of our existing systems.

Someday, though, I’d like to be able to make a post about how I’m sitting on the front porch of my little concrete hacienda out in boonies, watching the clouds drift by, listening to the creek, and occasionally popping off some ammo at whatever target of opportunity happens to pass by. Hey..it could happen.

At this point of introspection, the blogger would usually make some sort of comment like “I couldn’t have done it without you, the readers…and for that I am grateful.” Well, that sounds nice but it really isn’t true. Even if not a single person read this blog, it would still be here today and probably just as good (or bad) as it is now. But…the readers do make me enjoy blogging more than if it were just me yelling into the emptiness. So…theres that. I like to think that people who have hung around here a while have enjoyed the postings and in some way have felt a bit of a connection. That’s probably the biggest enjoyment I get from blogging – the connection. You see, back in the old days, before the interweb, we survivalists could very easily think that we were the only ones. We never really met other survivalists, or had a efficient way to communicate and meet  with other like-minded individuals, so it was very easy to think that you were unique and possibly a little weird in your outlook. Over the years, through the blog, I’ve had the immense satisfaction of encountering other people who had the same darn outlook.. and that sort of reinforcement is really useful at times. So…if nothing else, I hope I’ve helped to make some folks feel like they weren’t alone in their concerns and interests.

Thats about it, I guess. Back to our regularly scheduled brain droppings.

I’ve been remiss in mentioning it, but as of late a few people have ponied up a few bucks in the tip jar and for that I am grateful. Although there’s a little PayPal donation link button at the top right hand of the page, virtually no one uses it. There are, though, a couple people who not only kick in a few bucks but actually make a repeating donation every month…and thats really nice of them. Mucho thanks.

Where does it go? Honestly, it goes to domain renewal and hosting. “What? That can’t be very much!” I hear you say…well, it isn’t. But what comes in isn’t very much either…so – it all goes to that.

I try not to put the arm on anyone because, honestly, I blog mostly for my own satisfaction. Once in a while I ask for donations to keep the renewal/hosting fund solvent but I havent done that in…lets see…I think three years. Of course, I’d never say ‘no’ to any donations that came my way but I’m not going to be annoying and make pleas every few months either.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge the folks that kick in for keeping the lights on here and give them their due. Thanks guys!

We now return you to our regularly scheduled descent into dystopia.

April 15 will be…:::drum roll::: the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. I do believe that might  make me the longest running blog about preparedness that is still active.

I should get an ice cream cake or something………

..hmm… yeah..an ice cream cake. Vanilla ice cream with chocolate cake.

Yeah.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Those of you who comment know that WordPress usually prompts you for a name and, if applicable, website. Additionally, if you are so inclined, you can post comments anonymously. Lotsa folks disable anonymous commenting because it can get pretty ugly at times but so far it hasn’t been too bad, so I leave it turned on. Don’t abuse it, kids.

I do read every comment that comes through here. (I have to, since a comment only gets posted once I approve it.) Spam comments bypass me and go straight into a spam folder. Usually the spam detector is pretty good and legitimate comments very rarely wind up in there. If I do find a legitimate comment in the spam folder I always redirect it to the appropriate post.

Although I do read, and enjoy (usually), most comments I am always interested in comments from people who have their own blogs as well. I’ve found some very interesting blogs that way. If you havent noticed, when scrolling through comments to a post, the persons name will be linked to their website (if they entered one)…you may want to follow a few of them and see where they go. Some are preparedness related, some aren’t, some are general interest, and some are just uninteresting (to me), but it’s a nice way to get some new exposure. So if you have a blog or website you want to share, make sure to add it when you add your name to the comments. BUT..add it only if it really is your website/blog…not some website/blog you think I should go to.

Also, generally speaking, I don’t edit comments. If you’re trying to make an intelligent argument to someone, check your spelling because I won’t clean it up for you. Also, use profanity if you want, I don’t care. I’m not one of these hypocrites who thinks posting about slitting the throats of bad guys in the post-apocalyptic world is okay but using the word ‘dick’ will somehow horrify readers. (Although I prefer folks not use racial slurs…somehow it seems to dumb things down more than profanity does.) If youre going to use profanity, use it sparingly as an enhancer to your point…don’t just use it gratuitously.  The only thing I do ask people to refrain from doing is dropping religious/superstitious comments…there’s already way too much of that in other blogs and I really try to keep it out of here. I think of posting about religion like a penis – its great that youve got one, I’m glad youre proud of it and that it brings you joy, but don’t wave it around in here and dont try to force it down my throat. There’s plenty of preparedness blogs out there where you can tell people how awesome your beliefs are and how evil and wrong theirs are..go do it there. (Note – Im not saying your religious beliefs are wrong or silly..I’m simply saying I just dont want ‘em posted here.)

I usually let comment flamewars burn themselves out but sometimes it just gets way outta control and I have to close comments. A little online brawling is good..gets the blood and ideas flowing, but sometimes it goes too far. Try to wrap up your  vendettas in two or three cascading comments.

Finally, if you have some detailed comment or something that you want kept private, you can always email it to me. My email address is in the ‘About’ section of the website.

And I think thats pretty much all the admin stuff for the moment. Thank you, and have a nice day.

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Happy Chrismahanakwanzakah.

I look forward to hearing about your gift AAR’s.