Toward the end of our (X) childhood, a number of major transitions in the handling of kids were being made:
Playgrounds were being transitioned into minimally-dangerous versions of themselves
Bullying was being cracked down on
Latchkey parenting was being recategorized as neglect and being cracked down on my CPS
This meant that Gen X kids had a lot of situations to deal with as kids where they had to develop physical skill as a means of staying safe.
For example by the age of 7 I could climb a tree and be pretty safe because I had developed upper, lower, and trunk body strength, awareness of how strong a branch is and how to test it for strength, how to detect when a contact point I was resting on was slipping, and how to control my mind enough to maintain enough focus to not slip up while climbing.
On playground equipment, I had to be ready for a fall onto concrete, and I had to know when wood was likely to produce enormous splinters (I actually got a huge splinter through my ass once. It went in below my butt cheek and came out above it), and I had to deal with the results of kids going crazy trying to spin the spinny thing as fast as they could. I went flying off that thing so many times.
Also, during the summer when I was 7, my friend was 8, and we had little bikes, and we would spend the entire day outside wandering the town. We often would find a stream and slowly work our way up the stream. This involved a lot of balancing on rocks and logs, catching small animals, even fighting my friend sometimes. We’d swim in muddy streams that were full of broken machinery and glass bottles, and it was up to us to know how to stay safe in that environment.
The world was just less safetyfied back then.
Now I see people of age 20 or so, and they walk like toddlers. I’m not talking about disabled people here. Just people who are able-bodied, but they move like they’ve been recently downloaded into a human body, like it’s unfamiliar to them.
Batman returns is really dumb. The movie craftsmanship (or whatever) is well done but the premise is just so stupid (to me). I feel this way about all super hero films, I just can't get past that the source is comic books for kids. I cannot take them seriously.
“Comics are for kids” is an incredibly narrow view of the comic book world. They’ve never been exclusively for kids, not even the big superhero comics. Many have diverse themes, thoughtful critiques of society, and impressively deep characters.
Completely agree and quite some of the Batman comics I have read I would not give to a child, far to much violence and quite a lot of very dark theams. Young teens are around when I would start being comfortable letting them read those and that’s still requires me to actually know them to some degree to make that judgement.
Skatcast has something for everyone. Tuesdays are the Skatcast Show. Cartoons for your earballs. Wednesday is the Dipshit Files. True crime stories with humour thrown in. Thursday is Dave and Angus. Two characters travel to different states, learning about them while also being kicked out of half the places the visit. Friday is Just A Ride. 3 hosts talk about everything from religion and politics, to how to be the best version of yourself, to poop jokes. Saturday is Skat-Tunes. An hour of user submitted music across all genres from unsigned bands. And starting next week, Sunday has a new show (who’s name escapes me) centered around video games
Dark Ages. It’s a fantasy/workplace comedy about the staff of the Rivercliff Museum of Mostly Natural History. I won’t go into more detail to avoid any spoilers but it’s been one of my favorites for awhile now though sadly there’s only one season so far.
Also, EOS 10, which is about the medical staff on a space station and the funny/weird/bonkers stuff they get into.
I don’t like Hereditary. I tried to watch it 3 times but I just can’t get through it. I think the beginning is great but I dunno, I just didn’t like it. I do love Midsommar however.
Heat waves are basically the only serious thing here. There isn’t really much to surviving them for the average person. Stay where it’s cool, stay hydrated, don’t over exert yourself in the heat. All really easy things to do if you have a reasonable amount of security in your life. Most don’t bother except maybe making sure to contact elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives.
Preparation is needed if you’re not financially secure. Maybe you’re homeless, maybe you’re too broke too cool your home, maybe a lot of things. I’ve been there before. To this day I’m still aware of places I can find shelter across the city and how to get to them, with and without public transport, in a hurry.
Mostly the answer is libraries but it depends where you are in the sprawl and how bad the heat wave is. They’re great during business hours but they can close before things cool down. I learned to get really good at loitering in shops and other private places while expending as little as possible without them moving me on.
Also where to get potable drinking water for free, you’ll be surprised how hard it can be to find in a pinch.
Edit: I forgot an underrated and personal favorite method from those days - trains.
Before everything went electronic it was really easy to travel free without the stereotypical methods of fair evading, so you could relax when inspectors were on. I’d find a train with functioning air conditioning on one of the ‘safe’ lines and just ride it for the whole round trip back to the central station then find a new one. Outside of peak hour it would be dead quiet and I could read or sleep in peace, and they go till late.
If you’re curious about the fair evasion method, the old tickets were just small bits of plastic-y cardboard with a magnetic strip on the back. Ticket machines would read the magnetic strip, write to it and mark down a trip in ink on the front of the ticket. If the magnetic strip ever failed they’d still honor the ticket and use the marks on the front to determine how many trips you were owed.
All you had to do was stop it being inked (or remove it). The tolerances on the machines were quite large so you could easily just put a bit of tape on the front and peel it off after to have an unmarked ticket. If you were desperate, you could sometimes rub it off anyway. Then all you needed to do was run a magnet over the magnetic strip or bend the ticket until it was damaged in the right way for a “fresh” but broken ticket. You’d then exchange it as a broken one and have a new ticket. If inspectors ever came around while you had a broken one they’d just tell you to take it in and leave you be.
This way you’d theoretically only ever need to buy one ticket, though it was still advisable to pay when you could or fair evade other ways to avoid become a regular at the service stand. My mother was an alcoholic and my father a deadbeat so this was how I made it to school for years.
I’m sure there is some trick with the new electronic cards but I’ve been fortunate enough to not need to work that out since they came in.
My parents and I live in a rural area on the west coast. It’s all about wildfire, baby. (Maybe earthquakes might be a problem but we’re far enough inland that we don’t usually see any.)
We’ve had to massively step up our fire break game, to the point of purchasing a larger brush cutter for our tractor to handle it all. Every fence line has a 50ft wide cut on either side and roughly 40 acres around the house itself is cut to bare dirt.
We’ve limbed all the pine trees near the house up to about 18-20ft off the ground, and taken out a lot of young trees that would provide ladder fuel. Any of the trees within a few hundred feet of our house get watered 3-4 times during the summer to keep their moisture content up.
We have a 250gal, 21hp wildland fire pump that lives on the back of our winter feed truck from May until October. It can spray about 80 feet…
We also maintain an 7500gal swimming pool with the filter pump plumbed up to act as a transfer pump into the fire rig for quick refilling.
Additionally, my dad added two large rain bird sprinklers to the roof of our house that can each dump about 8 gallons a minute of water out from our well, maintaining a wet zone about 20ft around all sides of the house, which has concrete fire-resistant hardiboard siding on it. The well itself is also set up to run from a propane backup generator if the power company cuts service during a fire.
There’s really not much else we can do beyond having our critical documents in a briefcase and praying.
Holy crap pets. Both of my dogs passed, but it was about $1,000/yr each for normal stuff, when you add it all up. Food, vet, boarding, toys, beds, etc. you aren’t kidding.
I also know that people will skip better food and the vet, meaning they end up with unhealthy pets too.
All of the foods suck, just use your dog as a food disposal for healthy stuff that is starting to get sketchy. There stomach can handle it, and honestly my dog will pull it out of the trash or compost bin completely wrotten and eat it anyway.
Also don’t buy a dog if you live in an apartment, or don’t have land and refuse to walk, it’s just mean. They are meant to expend a crazy amount of energy, and the blame only falls at your own shoes when they inevitably destroy your apartment or have health issues.
Droughts, hurricanes and theoretically earthquakes. Last actually disastrous earthquake was about 700 years ago though, so I dont worry about those. Last huge hurricane was in 1999. I haven’t really prepared against natural disasters in particular, though I do have some food and water stockpiled.
Maybe a little old-fashioned (the first book was written in the 60’s), but I love Jack Vance’s Gaean Reach setting. Thousands of worlds with each of them containing a multitude of civilizations, each of those with their own strange customs. Some of them advanced, others medieval and some of them almost completely alien.
For me it is one of the best universes when it comes to exploration and experiencing new worlds.
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