Wait, How Do You... Everything?

From the things I post you would probably think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the collapse of society.

I don't really, it's just very interesting, much more interesting than the complex and ultimately impractical structures and devices I design when I'm bored.

Anyway, the collapse of society!

So, society has collapsed!

The EMP has knocked out all our technology or the zombies have sent us into a panic or a disease has wiped out 70% of the Earth's population or I guess aliens?

The point is shit has gotten real.
No-one is manning the power stations.
The chain of supply has been interrupted.
We're on our own.

Shit!
OK!
No!
Keep calm!
Right!
What first!?
We have to be smart about this!

Shelter!
Water!
Food!
Medicine!
Clothes!
Furniture!

I guess loot it?

No!
Shit!
Everyone else is looting it!
And even if we do manage to loot it, it'll eventually run out!
Crap!
OK, uh...

How do you grow your own food?
How do you preserve that food?
How do you make your own materials?
How do you make your own clothes?
How do you build your own house? One that doesn't rely on all the shit we don't have any more to function properly!
How do you source safe drinking water?
Does anyone know how to make penicillin?

Nope.

And there's no electricity because the zombies ate all the power plant dudes or the tech is all fried because of the EMP aliens, so we can't check the internet.

TO THE LIBRARY!

Fuck!
Everyone else got here first!
Some people cleared out all the reference books and some people wanted to burn the fiction section to stay warm in winter and then there was a big fuck off battle between the cultureless weenies and the booklovers!
Crap!

If only I had compiled a survival library before this happened!
Survival for Dummies!

Wait!
Society hasn't collapsed yet!
It's not too late to squirrel away a reference library of helpful instructional tomes to keep you and yours alive in the challenging years to come!

Look!

OK, they probably don't have 'How to make Penicillin for Dummies' but that's where you have to branch out and get books like this!

I grabbed me up a copy of this recently and while I haven't actually got it behind glass, it is sitting there calmly reassuring me that I will have some idea of what to do should the world as we know it end*.

And while I can't say that I am putting together a 'How to Everything for Dummies' library with assorted references and instructional texts, I can't promise you I'm not.

Also this is why we should make sure that local government doesn't shut down our libraries.
We'll need them when the shit hits the fan.
But we probably shouldn't mention the zombies in our letters to our local members of parliament... People get weird about stuff like that.



*Realistically I know what I would do is panic and die or get gathered up into some hey-feudalism-so-great-let's-try-that-again! warlord's harem or something.