It's not even realistic optimization Like I'm absolutely certain now that I think about it that accumulating a lot of "domain-specific knowledge" by looking things up while you still can would be far more valuable for the apocalypse than any six hour "resilience" lesson
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I did a thread before about this Ancient cultures survived by *already knowing* what plants were safe to eat and which ones were toxic, thanks to "experiments" carried out in forgotten ancient times generations ago
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If everyone had to just kind of blunder around discovering which plants are poison from scratch, we would just die out
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You don’t get to have a giant brain and helpless infants without society. We need it like we need opposable thumbs.
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One of the books that played a big role in my childhood was My Side of the Mountain by Jean George, in the classic wilderness survival genre fantasizing about a kid running away from home to live in the woods But one thing that sticks out to me is how dependent on books he was
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
Unlike less-researched books in this vein where the wilderness survivor just magically knows things or discovers things Sam is a nerdy bookworm, he looks things up ALL THE TIME His one-person survivalist fantasy is only made possible by generations of other people's research
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
I mean, he openly "cheats" He's not really cut off from civilization at all, he's only a few miles from town, he comes back regularly to check out new books at the library whenever there's a new topic he needs to research
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
It's a self imposed challenge, he's decided he can come back to town for information, just not to buy actual food or supplies, and that qualifies as "living off the land" (To be fair, he is succeeding at living without spending money, which he doesn't have, only a library card)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
Yeah. And he's having fun. He's occasionally making a statement by it, but mostly, he seems to want to have a place to himself away from his big, noisy family. Who show up at the end to join him, for some reason.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
Like, it's fundamentally a *personal* quest, not a social or political one. He's challenging himself, and asserting his own personal independence, for a little while, to see what it's like. And, fwiw, he gets lonely pretty fast!
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Yeah and midway through the story his solitude is disrupted by Bando, the old hippie dude who freely gifts him some more "domain knowledge" that becomes key to making it through the winter (baking pottery and making fruit preserves)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @earnest_rs and
Yeah, who starts calling him "Thoreau" in case it's unclear what the inspiration for all of this is.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
There's probably a pretty distinctive statement being made about gender, and it's not a good one. Sam primarily escapes from his mother and sisters; his father happily visits him. And then he replaces his female relatives with a female bird.
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