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secret-engima · 3 years

Note

In the Gremlin!verse - I think that Torchwick is really the person who helps Oscar get *comfortable* with using his magic. Most likely through a combination of practicality and making it *fun* - Oscar needs to learn, because this is part of him, however that happened, and because you don't neglect any tool in your arsenal. He then follows up on it by encouraging Oscar to use said magic for - little things. Frivolous, everyday, *ordinary* things. He encourages Oscar to /have fun/ with it.

hamelin-born

said:

Gremlin!verse: Of course, the thing that would *really* make Oscar snap and break out the magic - the proverbial Nuclear Option, so to speak - is something threatening to hurt his /friends/. And when he /snaps/ - well. Remember the scene of the Fully Realized Winter Maiden, and how nothing and no one could touch her? Yes, that. Except more spherical, and in crackling green, with flickering tendrils of red and black.

Me: Yesssssss

Torchwick is too practical to let such a tool go to waste, but he knows that kids ... need positive reinforcement. Neo did, and she was older than Oscar (physically) when he picked her up and took her in. He understands that there is trauma associated with the magic, but it NEEDS to be trained. Especially so Oscar doesn’t trigger his own panic attack if he has to defend himself with it. So Torchwick starts small and practical and FUN. He realizes that Ozpin was always serious with magic (from what Oscar says) so he starts having Oscar practice via frivolously little things. Lighting candles with a snap of his fingers, making Neo’s hair go poof with a bit of static, making snowballs out of thin air for an impromptu team snowball fight. Little illusions during story time with Whitley.

It helps. Slowly, and fitfully, it helps. Oscar stops flinching when he uses his magic, stops freezing when he sees the red veins amid the green. And he takes a mischievous pleasure in using his magic for the silliest things. Then after a few years he gets comfortable enough to offer animal transformation to them all and the rest is history XD

Yesssss. The Nuclear Option is reserved solely for protecting his friends, and when he REALLY goes to town- it’s even more devastating than the Winter Maiden in canon. It HOWLS and snarls and destroys everything that Oscar doesn’t recognize as HIS. This expanding emerald and red-black veined shield of DESTRUCTION.

#SE asks #hamelin-born asks #Secret Engima Rambles #Team Gremlin verse #rwby #dadwick

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freedomartspress · 4 years

Text

Three Poems — Tongo Eisen Martin

Kick Drum Only

All street life to a certain extent starts fair

Sometimes with a spiritual memory even

Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even

Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far

My sensitivities to landfill districting and minstrel whistles/

White supremacist graffiti on westbound rail guards

-all overcome and reauthored

The garbage is growing voices

Condensed Marxism

modal gangsterism for a warrior-depressive

Underpass in my pocket

because I am a deity

or decent bid on the Panther name

revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists

or muted stage of genius

A merciful Marxism

Disquieted home life

Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person

Who is relaxing next to a gun

I stare at my father for a few seconds

Then return to my upbringing

Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks

Revolution is damn near pagan at this point

You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.

Wants a pen cap full of bullets

Wants to see their ancestors in broad daylight

I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that give them a relativity

My only change of clothes prosecuted

The government has finally learned how to write poems

shoot-outs that briefly align…

that make up a parable

white bodies are paid well, I posit

do white men actually even have leaders?

all white people are white men

white men will only ever be metaphors

all I do is practice, Lord

A rat pictures a river

Can almost taste the racial divide

Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber

Knows who in this good book will fly

I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again, Lord

Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain

We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win

A city gone uniquely linear

Harlem of the West due a true universe

“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said

so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation

My rifle made of tar

My targets made of an honest language

This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining

Writing among the lesser-respected wolves

Lesser-observed militarization

Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming

lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection

I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem

in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer is dead.”

standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade

bay of nothing, Lord

nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism

and the last of the inherited asthma

children given white dolls to play with and fear

facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe strings

I can hear hate

And teach hate

And call tools by people names

And name people dead to themselves

no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon

carving the equator into throats soon

I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord

pre-dawn monarchy

friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste

minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders

my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge

For these audiences

I project myself into a ghost like state

For these gangsters, I do the same

every now and then, we take a nervous look east

Sleep becomes Christ

Sleep starts growing a racial identity

do you ever spiral, Lord?

has the gang-age betrayed us?

be patient with my poems, Lord

So much pain

there is a point to crime…

There has to be if race traitors come with it

Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?

Better presidents than these have yawned at cages

Have called us holy slaves

Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries

Baby, I don’t have money for food

I have no present moment at all

I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money

I go to the railroad tracks

And follow them to the station of my enemies

A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative

All over the united states, there are

Toddlers in the rock

I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket

And why blood agreements mean a lot

And why I get shot back at

I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway

White skin tattooed on my right forearm

Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed

into a rat-infested manhood

My new existence as living graffiti

In the kitchen with

a lot of gun cylinders to hack up

House of God in part

No cops in part

My body brings down the Christmas

The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets

Pray over the 28th hour’s next beauty mark

Extrajudicial confederate statue restoration

the waist band before the next protest poster

By the way,

Time is not an illusion, your honor

I will return in a few whirlwinds

I will save your desk for last

You are witty, your honor

You’re moving money again, your honor

It is only raining one thing: non-white cops

And prison guard shadows

Reminding me of

Spoiled milk floating on an oil spill

A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise

A new lake for a Black Panther Party

Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders

Pharmacy doors mid-slide

The figment of village

a noon noose to a new white preacher

Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile

-All in an abstract painting of a president

Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?

The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars

A cold-blooded study in leg irons

Leg irons in tornado shelters

Leg irons inside your body

Proof that some white people have actually fondled nooses

That sundown couples

made their vows of love over

opaque peach plastic

and bolt action audiences

Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science

Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists

My arm changes imperialisms

Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies

Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums

Artless bleeding and

the challenge of watching civilians think

“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”

“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”

Modern fans of war

What with their t-shirt poems

And t-shirt guilt

And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,

I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life

The Chicago Prairie Fire

First, I must apologize to the souls of the house

I am wearing the cheek bones of the mask only

Pill bottle, my name is yours

Name tagged on the side of a factory of wrists

Teeth of the mask now

Back of the head of the mask now

New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces

Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family

I am not creative

Just the silliest of the revolutionaries

My blood drying on

my only jacket

just as God got playful

the police state’s psychic middlemen

Evangelizing for the creation of an un-masses

An un-Medgar

Blood of a lamb less racialized

or awesome prison sentence

Good God

Elder-abuse hired for the low

dog eat genius

Right angle made between a point

On a Louisiana plantation

And 5-year old’s rubber ball

3 feet high and falling

like a deportee plane

to complete my interpretation

(of garden variety genocide)

I am small talk

about loving your enemies

A little more realistically

About paper tigers

And also gold…

I need my left hand back

I broke my neck on the piano keys

Found paradise in a fistfight

Maybe I should check into the Cuba line

Watching the universe’s last metronomes

some call Black Jacobins

Just wait…

These religions will start resigning in a decade or two

Some colorfully

Some transactional-ly

In a cotton gothic society

Class betrayal gone glassless/ I mean ironically/ my window started fogging over too

Wondering which Haiti will get me through this winter

Which poem houses souls

Which socialist breakthroughs

Breakthroughs like ten steps back

Then finally stillness

Stillness

Then stillness among families

a John Brown biography takes a bow

I’m up next to introduce Prosser to Monk

I remember childhood

Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning

Scribbling on an amazing grace

I rented this body from some circumference of slavery

Remember being kicked out of the Midwest

Strange fruit theater

Lithium and circuses

Likeminded stomachs

The ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy foam…

with opioid tea

Sentient dollar bills yelling to each other pocket to pocket

Cello stands in the precinct for accompanying counterrevolutionaries

My mother raised me with a simple pain

A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather

Or first-girlfriend gravity

Police-knock gravity

Mind-game gravity

Or revolution languishing behind

The sugar in my good friend’s mind

“The difference between me and you

Is that the madness

Wants me forever”

A pair of apartments

Defining both my family

And political composure

Books behind my back

Bail money paved into the streets

Playing:

Euphoria

Cliché

Bracing for the medicine’s recoil

Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friends

Black Jacobins

Underground topography

Or grandmother’s hands

Psychology of the mask now

Teeth of the mask again

—

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already was nominated for a California Book Award.

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thecomicsnexus · 5 years

Photo

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #228-230 JULY - SEPTEMBER 1984 BY GERRY CONWAY, ALAN KUPPERBERG, GEORGE TUSKA, ALEX NIÑO, PABLO MARCOS AND GENE D’ANGELO

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

The Martian Manhunter races back towards Earth with a squadron of Martian warships hot on his tail. They manage to damage his ship sufficiently to fore him to crash land in the East River off Manhattan. His old allies in the Justice League try to help him, but J'onn quickly flies away with no explanation. They manage to catch him and get him to calm down, whereupon the Manhunter explains that the Martians of Mars II plan on conquering the planet Earth.

The Marshal, leader of the Mars II forces sends a robot liaison to the United Nations. This robot, the Challenger, issues an ultimatum, demanding that Earth surrenders itself to Martian control within one "terrestrial revolution".

As the Challenger leaves, the Justice League realizes that nothing may stave off a pending war between the two worlds.

Before waiting for a response from the United Nations, Martian warships begin destroying Earth's orbital satellite network.

In New York, Firestorm grows suspicious of the Martian Manhunter's true intentions. He suspects that J'onn may have deliberately led a Martian scout force to Earth.

Aquaman confers with the President of the United States. The President inquires about the League's more powerful members, namely, Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman. Aquaman has no idea where they are.

At the United Nations, the U.N. secretary general declines the Martian order of surrender, declaring that Earth will defend itself. Firestorm appears thrilled over the secretary's perceived bravado, but the Elongated Man soberly explains that Earth may not survive this war.

Martian warships converge on the Justice League satellite and nearly destroy it. The Challenger boards the station where he finds the other members of the League. Green Arrow manages to lay him low with a Wall-Smasher Arrow.

The Martian Manhunter dons a space suit and takes a Justice League shuttle. He intends on facing the Marshal directly.

The Martian Manhunter flees the ruins of the Justice League satellite. The Marshal's men pick him up on their image scanners and alert their leader that J'onn is heading their way.

On Earth, President Reagan confers with Soviet leaders as well as the U.N. Secretary General with regards to implementing nuclear options to repel the Martian fleet.

Martian warships continue to blockade Earth's orbit. They engage Hawkman and Hawkwoman and open fire on their Thanagarian ship. The Hawks engage the ship's cloaking device, giving the illusion that they were destroyed in the crossfire. They reappear outside the perimeter of the blockade and open fire on the enemy ships.

Meanwhile, Martian scouts board the Justice League satellite. Black Canary and the Elongated Man fight them off, and Zatanna uses her magic to electrocute the remaining troops. Firestorm flies off to find the Martian Manhunter.

On the Marshal's ship, the Martian Manhunter lands his craft and finds his old lover, J'en. J'en is under orders to kill the Manhunter, but cannot bring herself to open fire on him.

The Manhunter heads to the command bridge where he challenges the Marshal in a trial by combat. He wins the fight, and the Marshal loses face before his underlings. J'onn convinces the remainder of the fleet to agree to a cease-fire, and they leave Earth's orbit to return to Mars II. J'onn however, elects to stay behind.

REVIEW

Early in this story, Firestorm mentions that the US has been nervous since “last September”. These are the final years of the cold war, but fear of a nuclear winter were very strong in 1984. In September 1983, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were sharp, after the S.U. shut down a Korean plane.

And you cannot tell this story too far away from its context. This is the kind of story that Gardner Fox would have solved in three panels in the silliest way possible. But here, we really feel the tension in the U.N. and we can sense the consequences for Earth. Perhaps they shouldn’t have invested all their money in weapons that would kill the Earth, but, I don’t know, I am not a world leader.

Firestorm shows his usual ignorance in this story, representing a big percentage of the world population that cheers about wars. While the rest of the league feel sad that this may be the end of humankind.

Martian Manhunter doesn’t make it any easier on anyone in this story, as his stubbornness only complicates things. As a result, the Justice League is pretty much destroyed and without their headquarters (more on that very soon).

So where were the big guns of the JLA during this event... well, that’s the next story... in what would be, the last Crisis before the big Crisis.

I give this story a score of 8

8 notes · View notes

ffdfsvdsvsdv · 4 years

Text

Three Poems — Tongo

Kick Drum Only

All street life to a certain extent starts fair

Sometimes with a spiritual memory even

Predawn soul-clap/ your father dying even

Maybe I’ve pushed the city too far

My sensitivities to landfill districting and minstrel whistles/

White supremacist graffiti on westbound rail guards

-all overcome and reauthored

The garbage is growing voices

Condensed Marxism

modal gangsterism for a warrior-depressive

Underpass in my pocket

because I am a deity

or decent bid on the Panther name

revolutionary violence that chose its own protagonists

or muted stage of genius

A merciful Marxism

Disquieted home life

Or metaphor for relaxing next to a person

Who is relaxing next to a gun

I stare at my father for a few seconds

Then return to my upbringing

Return to the souls of Ohio Black folks

Revolution is damn near pagan at this point

You know what the clown wants? The respect of the ant.

Wants a pen cap full of bullets

Wants to see their ancestors in broad daylight

I am not tired of these rooms; just tired of the world that give them a relativity

My only change of clothes prosecuted

The government has finally learned how to write poems

shoot-outs that briefly align…

that make up a parable

white bodies are paid well, I posit

do white men actually even have leaders?

all white people are white men

white men will only ever be metaphors

all I do is practice, Lord

A rat pictures a river

Can almost taste the racial divide

Can almost roll a family member’s head into a city hall legislative chamber

Knows who in this good book will fly

I have decided not to talk out of anger ever again, Lord

Met my wife at the same time I met new audience members for our pain

We passed each other cigarettes and watched cops win

A city gone uniquely linear

Harlem of the West due a true universe

“I will always remember you in fancy clothes,” my wife said

so here I sit… twisting in silk ideation

My rifle made of tar

My targets made of an honest language

This San Francisco poetry is how God knows that it is me whining

Writing among the lesser-respected wolves

Lesser-observed militarization

Dixie-less prison bookkeeping/I mean the California gray-coats are coming

lynch mob gossip and bourgeois debt collection

I mean, it’s tempting to change professions mid-poem

in a Chicago briefing, a white sergeant saying, “blank slate for all of us after this Black organizer is dead.”

standard academics toasting two-buck wine at the tank parade

bay of nothing, Lord

nuclear cobblestones, gunline athleticism

and the last of the inherited asthma

children given white dolls to play with and fear

facial expressions borrowed from rich people’s shoe strings

I can hear hate

And teach hate

And call tools by people names

And name people dead to themselves

no one getting naturalized except federal agents soon

carving the equator into throats soon

I’m sorry to make you relive all of this, Lord

pre-dawn monarchy

friends putting up politician posters then snorting the remainder of the paste

minstrel scripts shoveled into the walls by their elders

my children sharpening quarters on the city’s edge

For these audiences

I project myself into a ghost like state

For these gangsters, I do the same

every now and then, we take a nervous look east

Sleep becomes Christ

Sleep starts growing a racial identity

do you ever spiral, Lord?

has the gang-age betrayed us?

be patient with my poems, Lord

So much pain

there is a point to crime…

There has to be if race traitors come with it

Lord, is that my revolver in your hand?

Better presidents than these have yawned at cages

Have called us holy slaves

Filled the school libraries with cop documentaries

Baby, I don’t have money for food

I have no present moment at all

I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money

I go to the railroad tracks

And follow them to the station of my enemies

A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative

All over the united states, there are

Toddlers in the rock

I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket

And why blood agreements mean a lot

And why I get shot back at

I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway

White skin tattooed on my right forearm

Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed

into a rat-infested manhood

My new existence as living graffiti

In the kitchen with

a lot of gun cylinders to hack up

House of God in part

No cops in part

My body brings down the Christmas

The new bullets pray over blankets made from old bullets

Pray over the 28th hour’s next beauty mark

Extrajudicial confederate statue restoration

the waist band before the next protest poster

By the way,

Time is not an illusion, your honor

I will return in a few whirlwinds

I will save your desk for last

You are witty, your honor

You’re moving money again, your honor

It is only raining one thing: non-white cops

And prison guard shadows

Reminding me of

Spoiled milk floating on an oil spill

A neighborhood making a lot of fuss over its demise

A new lake for a Black Panther Party

Malcom X’s ballroom jacket slung over my son’s shoulders

Pharmacy doors mid-slide

The figment of village

a noon noose to a new white preacher

Wiretaps in the discount kitchen tile

-All in an abstract painting of a president

Bought slavers some time, didn’t it?

The tantric screeches of military bolts and Election-Tuesday cars

A cold-blooded study in leg irons

Leg irons in tornado shelters

Leg irons inside your body

Proof that some white people have actually fondled nooses

That sundown couples

made their vows of love over

opaque peach plastic

and bolt action audiences

Man, the Medgar Evers-second is definitely my favorite law of science

Fondled news clippings and primitive Methodists

My arm changes imperialisms

Simple policing vs. Structural frenzies

Elementary school script vs. Even whiter white spectrums

Artless bleeding and

the challenge of watching civilians think

“terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy…beg for settler polity”

“I am going to go ahead and sharpen these kids’ heads into arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crests.”

Modern fans of war

What with their t-shirt poems

And t-shirt guilt

And me, having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus,

I have no choice but to read the city walls for signs of my life

The Chicago Prairie Fire

First, I must apologize to the souls of the house

I am wearing the cheek bones of the mask only

Pill bottle, my name is yours

Name tagged on the side of a factory of wrists

Teeth of the mask now

Back of the head of the mask now

New phase of anti-anthropomorphism fending for real faces

Stuck with one of those cultures that believes I chose this family

I am not creative

Just the silliest of the revolutionaries

My blood drying on

my only jacket

just as God got playful

the police state’s psychic middlemen

Evangelizing for the creation of an un-masses

An un-Medgar

Blood of a lamb less racialized

or awesome prison sentence

Good God

Elder-abuse hired for the low

dog eat genius

Right angle made between a point

On a Louisiana plantation

And 5-year old’s rubber ball

3 feet high and falling

like a deportee plane

to complete my interpretation

(of garden variety genocide)

I am small talk

about loving your enemies

A little more realistically

About paper tigers

And also gold…

I need my left hand back

I broke my neck on the piano keys

Found paradise in a fistfight

Maybe I should check into the Cuba line

Watching the universe’s last metronomes

some call Black Jacobins

Just wait…

These religions will start resigning in a decade or two

Some colorfully

Some transactional-ly

In a cotton gothic society

Class betrayal gone glassless/ I mean ironically/ my window started fogging over too

Wondering which Haiti will get me through this winter

Which poem houses souls

Which socialist breakthroughs

Breakthroughs like ten steps back

Then finally stillness

Stillness

Then stillness among families

a John Brown biography takes a bow

I’m up next to introduce Prosser to Monk

I remember childhood

Remember the word “Childhood” being a beginning

Scribbling on an amazing grace

I rented this body from some circumference of slavery

Remember being kicked out of the Midwest

Strange fruit theater

Lithium and circuses

Likeminded stomachs

The ruling class blessing their blank checks with levy foam…

with opioid tea

Sentient dollar bills yelling to each other pocket to pocket

Cello stands in the precinct for accompanying counterrevolutionaries

My mother raised me with a simple pain

A poet loses his mind, you know, like the room has weather

Or first-girlfriend gravity

Police-knock gravity

Mind-game gravity

Or revolution languishing behind

The sugar in my good friend’s mind

“The difference between me and you

Is that the madness

Wants me forever”

A pair of apartments

Defining both my family

And political composure

Books behind my back

Bail money paved into the streets

Playing:

Euphoria

Cliché

Bracing for the medicine’s recoil

Sharing a dirty deli sandwich with my friends

Black Jacobins

Underground topography

Or grandmother’s hands

Psychology of the mask now

Teeth of the mask again

—

0 notes

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

Depending on what kind of anxiety you have, doomsday is either far away or just around the corner. Whether it��s the class war, the race war, the rising tide, or the total collapse of civilization, we’ll all need food and water when it comes.

Doomsday prepping is an American invention, born from the nuclear panics of the 1950s. (Before that, survivalism was just called surviving.) Doomsday preppers stock up on the basics, often in accordance with the so-called “Rule of Threes,” which holds that a person in a crisis can survive for three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without security.

Prepping is a long-term, thoughtful kind of hoarding. It’s inverse, Black Friday, is fast, cheap, and fun — way down at the end of the stocking-up spectrum. This retail tradition evokes its own doomsday: bodies trampled by doorbuster deals, overworked and exploited low-wage workers, families trying to make ends meet.

One might argue that the holiday’s existence is a symptom of an economic system on the brink. Then again, one might use its great sales to load up on necessary items for the end times. I spoke to five people in the prepping business about what they’re hoping to pick up this weekend. (Quotes have been edited and condensed.)

Founder of CanadianPreparedness.com

What are you hoping to buy on sale this weekend, prepping-related or otherwise? Personally, nothing. I have literally everything a prepper could want.

On a shopping weekend as wild as this, how does one decide what is actually worth buying? I’d say nonperishables, ammo, first-aid supplies with no expiration dates — things which probably are not on sale. You can’t eat cheap TVs!

What are three items a non-prepper could buy to be at least a little more prepared? Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers will allow you to preserve many staple grains — rice, beans, and flour — for 30-plus years. Titan Survivorcord is a paracord that includes fishing line, snare wire, and a strand of jute twine infused with wax, for fire-starting. The Inergy Kodiak power generator is one of the most advanced lithium power generators on the market.

Do some preppers get caught up in buying gadgets? Of course. Our society is driven by rampant materialism, and prepping is no exception. The only difference is a $2,000 generator is more functional than brand-name clothing.

Writer, Off the Grid

What are you hoping to buy on sale this weekend? A tarp. For actual survival, a generic blue tarp from Lowe’s isn’t going to cut it. I’m looking for something that is specially designed to help you survive in winter, like [the Xenon winter tarp, $140 and the Old Man Winter by Wilderness Logistics, $160]. They can be used as a tent, as ground cover, to catch rainwater, to patch holes, for a trap, and even to drag back heavy animals.

What is something basic non-preppers should buy? A good flashlight. I recently was gifted this Flateye LED flashlight, and it’s like holding a car headlight in your hand. Not only can it light up the world around you, but you can use it to blind attackers or signal SOS.

How do you decide what kinds of things are actually worth buying? If people are deciding between two items, I always tell them to get the thing that’s more versatile. For example, you can use an air compressor to skin a deer, or set up an AR-15 to hunt deer.

Where are the amazing Black Friday deals? There are plenty of lists out there like this that have good deals for preppers. My advice would be to go to Reddit’s r/preppers on Black Friday itself. People will be posting deals that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else.

Host of Prepper Camp, the nation’s largest three-day prepper event

What are you hoping to buy on sale this weekend? Prepping is more about planning, knowledge, and skills than actually purchasing a lot of useless gadgets. I walked away from the consumer lifestyle many years ago and now live on an off-grid homestead. That said, there are always items that preparedness-minded people, like myself, keep their eyes open for. We are always looking for good deals on all things canning, such as jars, lids, pressure canners, and water bath canners. Or perhaps a higher-ticket item, such as a food dehydrator.

What would you tell a non-prepper to buy? Because water is the most important of your basic survival needs, I’d suggest a means of purification. We all are different, and preparedness is not one size fits all. This item could be tablets you drop into a gallon of water, all the way up to a contraption you put into a pond and drink from.

What’s the coolest prepper gadget you’ve seen? Manufacturers are always coming out with the latest, greatest gadget. I think we all are consumers at heart, preppers and non-preppers alike. I’m past the consumer phase, even though I’ve been known to drool from time to time. If money were no object, I’d love to see a freeze dryer under my tree.

Founder, the Organic Prepper

What are you hoping to buy this weekend? I will be looking at freeze-dried fruits and veggies. Just because there’s an emergency going on, that doesn’t mean I won’t want to give my family balanced nutrition.

What are silliest things you’ve seen other preppers buy? Tactical gear like bulletproof vests, or far more guns than they actually need. It’s really great to be armed and prepared to protect yourself if someone breaks in, but you can’t shoot 10 guns at a time.

What should people stockpile instead? Water is an absolutely enormous gap in a lot of preps, because who wants to go buy a whole bunch of 1-gallon jugs of water? Imagine spending $200 and all you’ve got is that stupid water. It’s not sexy, but you’re gonna use it. Water is actually a really good investment.

Do you see yourself as prepping for a specific kind of incident, or are you just trying to be prepared in general? The No. 1 emergency that most people are going to face is a financial problem, and that isn’t necessarily gonna be the collapse of the American economy. It’s more likely that someone in your family will lose their job, or you’ll have a huge medical expense that you weren’t expecting and can’t pay for. I’m a single parent. About 10 years ago, I lost my job. The fact that my pantry had enough food for several months meant I was able to use my savings and my unemployment payment to keep my mortgage paid.

Berkey Water Filter Sales, Directive21.com

How is your company thinking about Black Friday this year? Are you running any specials? Yes, but people are thinking more about having a good water filter on their kitchen counter than they’re thinking, “Oh, my gosh, the world’s economy is gonna collapse!” Usually the water filter industry is fear-based, or caution-based, or prepping-based. Right now it’s just mainstream interest. But yeah, we’re having specials. People will buy.

You’re saying business is up in the prepper industry? No! They’re buying less! Way, way less. The market is way different. If Hillary would’ve got elected, then it would’ve been completely different for our market — more guns, more bullets, more everything. It would’ve continued what was going on during Obama, for sure. But now people are happy and comfortable. It’s not that they aren’t buying; they’re just buying when they want to have purified water at home.

It’s interesting you say that, because I’m in New York City, and I find that people on the left are very unhappy and uncomfortable. I totally agree with you. I’m not saying this to be negative toward either side, but the left doesn’t put their money into it. I know there is a lot of fear on that side, but they just don’t buy like the other end of the spectrum does.

So you’re not anticipating a huge influx of sales? We have our core. They’ll buy. Cyber Monday is usually the big day for us, but it’s not as huge as you might think. It’s not like Amazon, you know what I mean? When the weekend is over, they’ll do over $10 billion or something. They’re so huge now! But yeah, there have always been ups and downs, business cycles. If we get a Democrat in 2020, business will pick up for us tremendously.

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Original Source -> What doomsday preppers are buying this Black Friday

via The Conservative Brief

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