The Prepper Broadcasting Network - THIS WEEK IN PREPPING 08/15/24 - Advantages of physical media

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

This week in prepping we take a look at russian economy, stealing chicken wings, targets forensic lab and more https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-economy-all-china-banks-refuse-yuan-ruble-transfers-sanctions-2024-8 https://halifax.citynews.ca/2024/08/15/hurricane-ernestos-track-shifts-south-of-nova-scotia/ https://www.the-sun.com/news/4788613/target-forensic-lab-solving-crime/ https://www.kcbd.com/2024/08/12/school-employee-gets-9-years-prison-stealing-15-million-worth-chicken-wings-district/ https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/panama-canal-open-to-traffic https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/arcadian https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/1er01zb/im_disappointed_with_my_response_to_danger/ https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/1eq5uz2/how_do_you_respond_to_hearing_gunshots/ https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-is-coming-to-radio-quiet-zones-in-the-us https://www.mining.com/money-metals-launches-americas-largest-gold-depository-bigger-than-fort-knox/ coNNECT WITH ME http://www.patchofthemonth.co/ PATCH OF THE MONTH CLUB http://toolmantim.co/ WEBSITE http://toolmantim.shop/ AMAZON AFFILIATE https://c3c5a9.myshopify.com/ MERCH http://www.youtube.com/c/toolmantimsworkshop/ YT

Thank you. for a few hours. We are fighting for our lives. My family must survive. Food for five years. A thousand gallons of gas. Air filtration. Water filtration. Coming at you from the frozen tundra that is east central Alberta, Canada, streaming live on YouTube. Welcome back to the workshop where we create community, find freedom, promote preparedness and share success. I'm Toolman Tim. Today is August the 15th, 2024. This is episode 464 of Workshop Radio. We are slowly coming up to a massive milestone. It's as we've cut back to once a week, we're going to be about 36 more weeks until we hit number 500, maybe a little closer as winter comes on, but it's good to see everybody. And Hey man, we got some folks in here. I haven't seen in a little while. We got a digger. Great to

see you, Jeff, Jeff and family, Jeff, Sandy, and the girls, Stark spags unfiltered and Mr. Strong roots resources himself, Carrie Brown. Good to see you, brother. So if anybody's wondering, you might have noticed I've shortened up the intro ever so slightly instead of streaming live on 842 different platforms. A few things, this really came out of a couple of things happening at once. But first off, Facebook has made it very, very, very difficult to do third-party streaming from some third-party app. I made it work once and then it stopped working and then I got it to work again and then it stopped working again. So it wasn't worth the hassle or the headache for the, you know, did I get some views on Facebook? Absolutely.

However, Twitter went to go live on Twitter the other day, and it is now a paid feature. If you want to stream live on Twitter from a third party platform, you have to be in the premium tier. You know, I might have got 10 views a week over on Twitter. So anyhow, it's been a long time coming. I've been sharing with you guys quite a bit about how I'm focusing very, very acutely on YouTube, how it has been my platform that has both brought the growth and brought the financial gain. And so a lot of the other stuff has been slid off to the wayside. And you know what? It's not worth the extra time at the moment to throw it out to those other platforms.

So we are here on YouTube. Actually, we are on my YouTube channel and we're also on my super secret backup YouTube channel. So there we are. All right. Let's take a look at the comments this evening. Cause I see somebody with a smart ass, something or no says a spags unfiltered says everyone make sure to hit that like button. Help Tim train his Canadian geese for the upcoming Avian Winter Olympics. Absolutely. One of my favorite events definitely is when they try to push frozen bottles of maple syrup uphill. It takes years of training with those geese to get them to do it. You should see it. Geese are not made to go uphill. Definitely not, especially not with frozen bottles of maple syrup up against their beak. So be careful. Debbie Nugent. Hello from Houston, Texas. Good to see you. Great to have

you in here. So let's open up this evening with a rule to live by. And if you guys have been following me the last, I don't know, 12, 16 weeks, something like that. I have been working my way through. I have at the moment, 34 rules I live by, or let me back up 34 rules that if I live my life by them, I do better. So that just means that I share these as a reminder to myself as much as I do to you folks. And so what I've been doing is each week I put one through 34 into a randomizer, hit the button. And this week, Google told me to go with rule number six, rule number six, almost all meetings can be replaced by a single sheet of plain white paper. And some meetings can be replaced by a double-sided sheet of white paper. And you know,

it's pretty rare. There's only a couple of these rules to live by that I remember where I was at the moment that I realized this is something important to me. And this one was in my college days. Once a month, we would have a campus-wide assembly that was so useless. Well, if you want to know why I've gone bald, it's because I pulled my hair out from those meetings. Every time I would sit down, I would think everything you're telling us could have been sent out in a memo. And now back up a little, because really it wouldn't even need to be sent out in a memo. Now it could just be sent out in an email. And of course, you know, my smart ass, I asked them one time, why don't we just do this in a, in a media or, you know, put it out on a

piece of paper. And the student Dean said, because you wouldn't read it. this in a, in a media or, you know, put it out on a piece of paper. And the student Dean said, because you wouldn't read it. And I said, so you mean I wouldn't pay attention to it? Like I don't pay attention at these live events. And anyway, yeah, I shouldn't have done that. So what this rule really truly is, is a reminder that a person's time is important and to not waste it on stupid, superfluous little meetings that don't mean anything. And if you're going to have a meeting, just make sure it's worth people's while. Don't go longer than you need to. You know, there used to be at least one person in every staff meeting that would ask 17 asinine questions that would waste everyone's valuable time. So don't do it.

But again, you know, this was, we did have a staff meeting at the daycare recently where everybody came together and we did our damnedest to make sure we respected people's time. So anyhow, see how I break my own rules sometimes, but truth be told, rule number six, almost all meetings can be replaced by a single sheet of white paper. It doesn't have to be white. It just happens to come out of a printer that way. So Jozek says he can't read. Well, that's okay because thank goodness we now have apps that will read to us.

So there is that. Still better than meeting in person. I promise you that. Ryan Pippin, good to see you. Happy Friday Eve, humans. Happy Friday Eve to you as well, sir. All right. Ryan Pippin, good to see you. Happy Friday Eve, humans. Happy Friday Eve to you as well, sir. All right, so from here, folks, let's slide into, well, I guess the segment that started it all.

If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house. The time has come for stranger than fiction. Stranger than fiction folks. This is where we take a look at the, the weird, the wacky, no, not really all kinds of different, uh, news stories, sometimes serious, sometimes prep related. And the last one that I have to share with you today is kind of funny. Uh, you kind of where some of these segments really started from back when has been about a year and a half ago when, Oh guys, I need to back up a little bit because the entire audience is just being a bunch of smart asses tonight. So we need to address it because it's very important. Not really, but Bobby or Mr. Spags unfiltered says he's looking forward to the

YouTube Braille option. I'm more personally waiting for Centomatic 100 where you can watch videos and smell chicken wings and things like that, but it hasn't happened yet. And of course, L2 Survive says, thanks for coming to the meeting that is alive. I mean, is not a live stream also the same as a meeting? That is very true, but then you don't get to look at this, you know, beautiful mug in front of, you know, I'm just getting away. So better than dumb asses. Yeah, that is true. Dumb ass is better than smart ass. So there you go. All right. So this week I got, uh, four quick stories that we're going to cover. None of them are super long or super in depth, but, uh, things that may be important to us, one that might be rather entertaining. Good to see you, Rachel Brown. Where are all those likes? Half of you are slacking. I agree.

Great to see you. So first story I came across this week that I thought was important enough to share was from thebusinessinsider.com. And this one is nearly all Chinese banks are now refusing to process payments from Russia, report says. Now, wherever you stand on the entire Russia-Ukraine situation, this one is interesting. Because at the beginning of the Russian-Ukraine conflict, there was quite a bit of talk, of course, of the sanctions being put on Russia. And how they wouldn't be able to transfer money using the inner bank transfer system, whatever it happens to be called. And Russia's like, fine, we'll just go and start our own system with China and a few others. They had two different systems they were looking at. Well, it looks like it seems to be falling apart

a little bit on them. So I don't know where this goes. I think that anytime you piss Russia off by increasing sanctions and by tightening things down, I really feel like you kind of are poking the bear, you know, the old Russian grizzly bear, because never a good thing, especially not Putin. I mean, look at him. You guys, you guys ever read the story about when he became power, came into power? I don't know if you remember this or not, but it was on December 31st, 1999. He figured it was important enough that it needed to be announced as the world was turning from one millennium to another. So the dude, you know, he might be a little bit full of himself. He might be slightly off his rocker, but when the Chinese start cutting you off, things might go a little bit haywire. I don't know,

but here it is. The impact of the West sanctions just seemed to be getting a little bit worse for Russia. Now, 98% of Chinese banks, even small regional ones, I don't know why I want to read this in a Russian accent. I really shouldn't, and I won't, I promise, but are refusing to accept direct Chinese payment transfers. Such issues appear to have intensified over the past three weeks as smaller Chinese financial companies that were processing them in the past aren't anymore. Last month was around 80%. Says doors between Russia and Chinese banks are closing. Since the invasion of Iraq, Russia and its trade partners have skirted sanctions by using smaller banks and other payment modes or this one here, non-U.S. dollar

currencies to circumvent the West ban on some Russian banks from the widely used Swift messaging system. But the doors have been closing for these workarounds since December when the U.S. approved secondary sanctions targeting institutions that were helping Russia. So again, it's like a giant whack-a-mole system. The U.S. says, you're not going to transfer money using the SWIFT system. Russia says, just you wait. And then they make friends with China back and forth. However, China seems to be realizing that they can't put up with it either. And so now things are getting just a little bit hairy, a little bit snaky over there. Says Russia is rushing. Russia is rushing to set up alternative payment mechanisms. Ed Celio, good to see you. I really appreciated those comments on the new

video the other day. He says, howdy from one CA to another CA, Californian to Canadian. We're all about the same, except you get nicer weather. As far as, anyway, I won't go into the Californian politics a whole hell of a lot. Reuters reported on Thursday that Russia and China were even planning to revive the age-old practice. I didn't even catch this part when I was prepping, guys. This is pretty funny. Here it is. Russia and China were even planning to revive the age-old practice of barter trade to get around Western sanctions. Really, isn't currency just another form of barter? Because barter, again, is one type of exchange to another. So I give you labor or I have something to offer.

It's just another form of exchange of currency. But while Russia's exports help finance its war effort, this is interesting, its imports are vastly more important for sustaining the economic, political, and military dimensions of its war effort. So it's one of those situations where everything looked like it was going Russia's way, I would say, until about three weeks ago, two weeks ago, when all of a sudden the Ukraine is like, surprise, we're now in Russian territory. I don't know. I don't know where I see this go, guys. I'm not, this is not a story to share for, you know, to tear everybody down and depress us all and make us sad and, you know, say that the sky is falling, chicken little, chicken little, whatever. No, it's just one of these stories to be aware of. I don't believe

in poking the Russian bear. And I think the more they poke him, the more he's going to come out and say, surprise. Anyhow, interesting story. Wanted to share it with you guys. Let's pop back over here to the comments. Oh, Spags, I did not hear this. There is some evidence of a coup that has taken place in China. This could be a result of massive policy changing. There is a Chinese trend of wanting to distance from Ping's anti-West stance. Well, I would like to throw it out there that 20 years ago, I think it would be maybe, you know, 10 to 20 years ago, it would be fairly popular to be anti-West in China. But as we have seen that the one child per family policy has basically decimated China's future.

I mean, they are going to be, you know, if we thought we were in a bad situation with the baby boomers, they're going to be like baby boomers on steroids. It's going to be a bad scenario. And a ton of their, I guess, financial heft comes from the United States and North America in general. You know, I mean, we ship a ton of shit over there to have them turn around and send it back to us and resell it. And I think that it goes a long way for China and the West to be somewhat at least strange bedfellows. I don't know. Could it be interesting? I hadn't heard this whole part about the coup and it would make sense if they were cracking down on it. I mean, you can only do so much. Again, if you're China, you don't really want to poke the American bear either, do you? I don't know. Because then he'll come out wearing a bandana and possibly a're trying to, you don't really want to poke the American bear either. Do you? I don't know. Cause then he'll come out wearing a bandana and possibly a mullet. I don't know.

And definitely driving a, a generally I would think so, but here we are. Forest fires are about the same in the CAs from piping, pipping, sorry, pipping. There it is. Forest. Yeah. We've been dealing with wildfire smoke for the last couple of days up here that has been as thick as I've ever seen it. It looked like East Coast fog driving home last night, except it's much worse on the lungs, on the head, on just miserable. I hadn't seen anything quite that bad. And then all of a sudden, early afternoon, it just kind of lifts away. So I guess the direction of the wind must have changed or something. it is pippin says totally driving a trans am t-top you are right and i'm gonna guess they're pulling in and they're either playing white snake or if

we go back a little further might be playing skinnered i'm not sure but and i got nothing against skinnered i play them all the time every time we're eight or nine minutes from home my favorite song to finish the road trip on is free Bird. So there you go. All right. Next story for this week, folks, what do we got? This one's quick. I actually, the reason I put this in here was for my East Coast Canadian friends, but latest Ernesto track show shift away from Nova Scotia. When I first grabbed this story, it was showing a track, the latest hurricane tracking almost directly overland in Nova Scotia, landing as a category three. And it looked really bad. Now, it's recently shifted to the east of Nova Scotia.

So it looks like it's going to hit Sable Island. But it's something for my East Coast friends to, and family to be aware of. It was enough of a story for me that I messaged dad today and I'm like, Hey, just giving you the heads up. Ernesto looks like he could be a bit of bits of trouble. So you might want to make sure you got a little extra fuel on hand for your generator. And so he went out and got a couple of extra five gallon jugs of gas. He's not the greatest at keeping fuel on hand. I try, but I figured this would be a good enough excuse to tell him, hey, you know, just in case. And here it is. So the latest forecast from Hurricane Ernesto shows Nova Scotia could avoid

a direct impact from the storm. Ernesto is set to track near or over the Bermuda this weekend as the storm center moves northward there on Sunday into Monday. So here's the track if you guys want to see it. And it shows at the moment, it's kind of tilting northeastward away from Nova Scotia. But if you see right there where it says 150 kilometers an hour, I know that's an odd terminology for you folks, but it wouldn't take much for it to swing back and go right over there. Now, at the moment, they're saying when it comes close to bringing the hurricane to Nova Scotia, at one point it was given category three. Now it's down to category one. It's been, now I've been away from there almost 11 years, but I believe it was September 2003 or four, we had Hurricane Juan came through and it was a category two, did quite a bit of damage. Normally hurricanes on the East

Coast, once they get to Nova Scotia have blown their luster, their bluster and it was gone. However, we got that nasty one, lost a lot of trees, some homes, that sort of thing. Later on in February of the next year, we had a hurricane strength storm in the winter. It was a blizzard. They decided to name it White One. At the time, I thought it was hilarious. Nowadays, I'm thinking, you know, some people might have a problem with that, but I don't mind. Here we are. All right. So just wanted to share that with you. Like I said, the latest track shows it moving off land, but it's one of those things that if you are trying to keep your head in the game, it's good to be aware of. All right. Byron Roberts says,

sweet home Alabama blasting. Yep. Nothing wrong with that. Pippin says, haven't listened to poison in a while. Ed Celio says you need to start free bird 20 minutes from home if you want to hear most of it. Very true. Rachel says it can be hard raising your parents, right? I know I do my best. And Pippin says, shake my Florida dude eight ball. Ernesto will not touch land heading back out to sea. Yep. Yeah. You never know. Right. I mean, there's been some really nasty ones, snort some of the eight ball. Oh geez. Here we are. That's great. So sliding right along. This is an interesting one. I ran into this story. I believe it was on some YouTube video a couple of weeks ago. Every so often when I have nothing better to do now, I will sit down. I really enjoy, uh, like Florida man videos and not

really Florida man, but most of them come from the Midwest and their police body cam videos. And you will see some absolute winners on there. I'll tell you, it's always a lot of fun, but I did recently find out, and I don't know if you guys have heard this, but here it is. This comes from Reddit, but there's stories all on the internet. If you want to check it out, it says target operates two criminal forensic labs and has worked with the Secret Service, ATF, and the FBI. This reminded me quite a bit of my interest in the Waffle House. And if you guys haven't heard, for the few out there that may not have, Waffle House has one of, if not the top, weather reporting kind of center in the U.S. Better than FEMA, better than the U.S. government

for the most part. It's kind of cool. So it turns out that Target has some of the best forensic labs in the entire United States. And it really comes down to fingerprints, video enhancement. But what ended up happening was, of course, as most publicly funded things do, when police or alphabet agencies end up running short on funding or don't have the time or the resources to do something, they started approaching Target and they're like, hey, Target, can you help us out? And it turned out that they were willing. And so interesting story that Target themselves have some of the top forensic crime labs in the United States. This one here, this is from a while back, but it says, I'm currently an employee at

Target working in asset protection, which is Target's way of saying loss prevention. It's absolutely true that we have two forensic labs, the bulk of which they do is fingerprint and digital forensics, enhancing video footage, extracting data from hard drives. Target's investigation pyramid is pretty intense focus primarily on organized retail crime, which doesn't surprise me. You could be amazed at how many people steal and how much they get away with. They do have the best loss prevention system in the industry by far. I'm regularly contacted by police to provide evidence to support their investigations, and they frequently comment on how amazing our camera systems are. It's also amazing how easy it is to steal from Target despite all of this. It turns out that in the end, it's far cheaper to lose a few million than to spend hundreds of millions in lawsuits. And then down

here, I thought this one was kind of cool. I work at a federal public defender's office, and I've seen firsthand the work that you guys do. Speaking of Target, of course, without going into details, I have a client now who is facing federal credit card fraud charges and will probably go to prison because of the very effective case Target built against him. Seriously, you guys are doing comparable and in many cases, better work than what I've seen from FBI, ATF, et cetera. So no matter where you stand, it's kind of interesting to see a private company, I guess, kind of ish, something from the private industry developing systems that are better than

publicly funded industry. So yeah, I mean, I don't love the fact that any of these alphabet agencies are in bed together, but how cool is it that Target has one of the best forensics labs in the U S I kind of like that. Byron Roberts says if Waffle House closes for weather, it's going to be bad. And Rachel says Florida man stories are the best laughs. Oh yes, they always are. All right. And speaking of laughs, here we are. This comes from KCBD. School employee gets nine years in prison for stealing. Are you ready for this, folks? 1.5 million, no, $1.5 million worth of chicken wings from the district. Let's just let that sit there for a minute. A million and a half worth of chicken wings from the district. Let's just let that sit there for a

minute. A million and a half worth of chicken wings. This lady stole. I don't know why. There's really no resolution to this case, but how the hell do you wake up one morning and think, I'm going to steal a million and a half dollars worth of chicken wings from a school board of all things? Here it is. It's a short story. I'm going to read you the whole bit. It comes from kcbd.com. Harvey, Illinois. Illinois, huh? A former employee, surprised that she's a former employee of a school district in Illinois has pleaded guilty to stealing $1.5 million worth of chicken wings. According to a report from WGN, Vera Lidell was arrested in January, 2023 and pled guilty Friday. She was sentenced to nine years in prison. Lidell, 68, was the food service director for Harvey School District 152 near Chicago for more than a decade.

The crimes took place during the COVID pandemic, when students were not allowed to be physically present at school. All kinds of shady shit come out of Illinois during COVID, didn't it? Court records show that Liddell ordered more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings from the school district's food provider and picked up the order in a district cargo van. The food was never brought to the school or given to the students. District funds were used to pay for the chicken wings, no shit, according to prosecutors. A report from WLS said the orders were placed over a 19-month period from July 2020 to February 2022. The scheme was discovered by the district business manager in January 2023 during a routine audit. They found

they were $300,000 over their annual food budget, despite only being halfway through the school year. Huh, considering nobody was in the classrooms at the time, the business manager also found it highly suspicious that chicken wings were ordered in the first place, since they are never served to students because they contain bones, prosecutors said. they're never served to students because they contain bones, prosecutors said. It's unclear what Liddell did with the $1.5 million worth of chicken wings. I don't know. Anybody have any suggestions as to what she did with $1.5 million worth of chicken wings? I laughed a bit at this story. Like I just couldn't resist. I had to share this. It was a

rather tasty morsel of a story. Oh boy, Tim, shut up. But I just, I couldn't resist. I had to share this. It was a rather tasty morsel of a story. Oh boy, Tim, shut up. But it, I just, I don't know. I mean, this, this, this story here really encapsulates what stranger than fiction has always been for me. Just funny, oddball, off the wall stories. It'll be interesting to find out. But my guess is like a lot of things during COVID, there was a lot of money being spent, very little oversight. And folks were like, Hey, I know what I can do. I can buy three pallets of N95 masks, and then I can turn around and resell them. And I'm guessing she was probably reselling them to restaurants or to a friend or something else. Byron Robert says, I hope she ordered

Buffalo sauce and ranch. Uh, yeah, I do too. And strong roots resources said big old neighborhood barbecue. I'm guessing. I mean, so 11,000 cases of wings, what's a case of wings going to weigh 10 pounds, 20 pounds. I don't know if you, if you say 20 pounds of wings, 11,000. So you're looking at, uh, Oh man, that would be 20, 220,000 pounds of wings. Something like that. Is my math correct on that? 11,000 times two is 22 times 10. Yep. 220,000 pounds of wings. That's a lot of wings, guys. So, yeah, you know, if a restaurant's going to sell them at five dollars a pound. Yeah, there's your one point five million dollars. So I don't know. I guess they probably priced them like they price cocaine. You know, you buy it by the pallet and then you sell it by the baggie and you make more money that way. Right. So anyhow,

there we are. Quick announcement for you folks. For anybody who is in the Tennessee area during the week leading up to Self-Reliance Festival, we're going to be doing a couple of Delinquents Gully Workdays, which is really an excuse for us to all get around and shoot the shit, learn some skills and fellowship and socialize. We're going to do two workdays, Wednesday and Thursday, October 2nd and 3rd. Then we're going to do a barbecue on Friday, October the 4th. There's free camping sites wherever you want to stay. If you drive a four-wheel drive vehicle, you can drive right back to the camp. If you drive a two-wheel, you know, two-wheel drive, yeah, whatever. Anyway,

you can still come back if you want, or you can park out at Jamie's place and we can shuttle you in, but it's not very far. It's about a mile, maybe a little less back the road, but we'd love to love to have you for sure. Uh, we've got a bunch of projects we're kicking around. We've got cabin build. Uh, we're looking at digging and building a dam, water collection systems, food forest guild install, mushroom log inoculation. That's way over my head, but yeah, something interesting if you're up for it. So hang in there, we'll give you more details, but that is like, what is that? Jeez, six weeks away. Man, I'm going to be, I got a lot to do between now and then. Here we are. Next comes the prepper files. And this is on this date. I got a story here for you. Well, it's short anyhow, but let's share it with you. So on this date in 1914,

Panama Canal opened to traffic. It took quite a few years of building, designing one of the largest projects in human history, other than when aliens built the pyramids, of course. But other than that, we're pretty close. And yeah, so here we are. In 1906, engineers decided on construction of a lock canal, and the next three years were spent developing construction facilities and eradicating tropical diseases. I forgot about that part. In 1909, construction began in one of the largest construction projects of all time. U.S. engineers moved nearly 240 million cubic yards of earth and spent close to 400 million in constructing the 40 mile long canal or 51 miles if the deepened seabed on both ends of the canal is taken into account and on August 15th 1914 the Panama Canal was open to traffic. So interesting, definitely something that has, I would say, encouraged or built upon the modern, I guess, economy we have.

Yeah, it's crazy. Think about how much stuff goes through there on the run of a regular day and the fact that it's been open for business for 110 years. for 110 years. That doesn't seem like, it doesn't even seem like we could humanly do something like that. Although you look back at some of the older things, all kidding aside,

things that the Egyptians and whatnot did. Anyway, so there you go. This week in the Prepper Files, the canal opened on 1914. All right, what do we got next for you folks? Here we go. He's dead. They're all dead.

Everyone, you and I are in a dead world, and I'm glad it's dead. Cheap honky-tonk of a world. Coming up next is Workshop Wasteland. All right, Workshop Wasteland. This is where we take a look at all things dystopian, post-apocalyptic, fiction, music, movies, books, video games, it doesn't really matter. Now, it was a slow week in the news, so I thought I would go back and give you a review of one of the few movies I watched during my three-ish week vacation. However, I did

catch a story real quick before I went live this evening. If you've ever read the Stephen King book, The Long Walk, it's one of my favorites. It was, I do believe it was one of his Richard Bachman pseudonym books, and I believe it was released in the Bachman book collection, the four of them. Anyhow, they are working on a harder version of it. It's never been turned into a film before. I'm pretty excited about it. It is definitely kind of dystopian. It's similar to Hunger Games, except instead of like traveling around in the woods and doing all those kind of things, they're just walking. You just walk and you have to keep a certain pace. And if you drop three times in an hour, they shoot you in the head and the winner supposedly gets a big prize

or something, but kind of a cool thing. If you've never read the book, it's a great read, but they're filming it now. I just started filming. Anyway. So this week I wanted to share with you guys a deeper look at the movie Arcadian, and this was starring Nick Cage. I watched this on the plane ride between Alberta and Nova Scotia and it wasn't bad. So it features, you'll see a picture here, Scotia. And it wasn't bad. So it features, you'll see a picture here, but it features the father and his twin teenage sons, their fight for survival in a remote farmhouse at the end of the world. So they, it's very similar. Well, we'll talk about this a bit, but they live mostly by themselves, kind of at the end of a laneway, kind of on a farm and horrible creatures come out at night. You don't really find out originally. And of course I won't spoil anything. I'm just going

to fill you in on the details and my thoughts of it. Horrible creatures come out at night. It's kind of a mix between a quiet place and it comes at night. Imagine that. The one son, he likes to travel around. He goes to visit the neighbors to help them with land, you know, projects and that sort of thing. Now, I don't know. Let's slide back a little bit, but I'm sure it helps that they have a teenage daughter roughly his age that he wants to go and see as well. And then the other son is really like, hey, I want to help dad. I want to do chores. Let's stay here. Stop being an idiot, that kind of stuff. And of course, at one point they decide to get an old side-by-side up and running. They have an accident. They stay out after dark chaos ensues. As you can imagine,

the dad goes out looking for him and I don't want to ruin too much after that. The film uses, I guess, um, I want to go back and talk about signs if you've never seen the signs film, but if you go back further than that Signs if you've never seen the Signs film. But if you go back further than that, Alfred Hitchcock, he always talked about the monster you didn't see was scarier than the monster you did. And Arcadian definitely takes a page of that out of their book because they definitely spend a lot of time leading up to it. They don't spend a lot of time showing the CGI monsters, which I really appreciate because I think it's more effective that way. But you do get to see them toward the end of the film. Now, one of my biggest pet peeves

in this movie was the shaky camera work. I'm guessing most of it was filmed on like handycam, you know, like shoulder mount rigs or something, but man, I don't know if it was going for just a realistic view, but it shook so much. It almost made me nauseous. If you look at the, there's quite a bit of a difference between the critics and the audience score. Critics gave it 77, which is certified fresh, and audience give it a 56. I would be somewhere in the middle of that, probably a 60 or something. And yeah, Pippin says, I feel like M. Night Shyamalan dude meets Blair witch. Yeah. There's some truth to that for sure. I can go with that. Yeah. And strong roots resources says shaky cam needs to quit. Yeah. In this day and age, there is no reason for shaky cam like

that. Like I get it, you know? Okay. If you want to once in a while, you know, be up close to an explosion and do a shaky cam, it's fine. There's just no need of it. Like you can, you can even artificially add a little bit of shake to it if you want to, but there's, it was guys, I'm telling you, like, I don't know. It was a bit on the nausea nauseating side and that really kind of hurt the film. But yeah, L2 Survive says kind of sounds like The Village that was a stupid movie. It's a bit different. The Village, I didn't care for The Village at all. Signs is one of my all-time favorite, you know, kind of apocalyptic horror movies. Definitely, I think, the best film that Shyamalan did. This is a bit different, but anyway. So one of the two twins, he plays,

I don't remember the actor's name, but he played Bill in It Part One and Two. And he also played the son of Melissa McCarthy in a movie that I absolutely loved. It was called St. Vincent, and it was a real underrated film, had Bill Murray in it playing kind of an old curmudgeon. I know, a big, big stretch there for him. But if you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out one time. Now, what caused the apocalypse in this movie? It's environmental. They don't really say what exactly, but it's an environmental collapse, which seems to be very common in films right now. The creatures, they don't tell you why they're there, how they got there, anything like that. I appreciate it. It isn't needed for this film. This is really a story of a father and two sons trying to survive on the edge of the world after the collapse. The title of the film,

Arcadian, it was interesting. I watched the whole movie and I'm like, I don't know what Arcadian is. I don't know what it refers to. There was no instance where all of a sudden the filmmakers like, and now they're moving on to the Arcadian peninsula or something like that just didn't exist. There was no reason for it. So I Googled it and it turns out that the term, and you got, some of you may know this, the term Arcadian refers to a person who lives a simple and quiet life, or in other words, a person who just wants to be left alone. And that sums up what this movie is, a father and a son who want to be left alone. Another son who probably doesn't, who wants to go out and sow his wild oats, but it, it is a film of a father and a son who just want to be left alone. They don't want to have to deal with any of it.

They're very, you know, prepared, I guess, you know, they can fight. They know what they're doing. They have food.

They're not in a rough situation by any means. They just want to be left alone. The film itself had a budget of $7 million, which is weird considering it only made 800800,000 in the box office. So I wouldn't look for a sequel anytime soon. And I'm guessing most of that $7 million went to Nicolas Cage. You know, whatever his paycheck happened to be. I was rated R for violence.

Yeah, there's some violence in it. You know, it could have been just as ineffective as a PG-13 film, but I enjoyed it. It was okay. It was certainly worth watching, but I enjoyed it. It was okay. It was certainly worth watching, but there are way better films out there. If you want to see three films that I would say watch before this, 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I love. It has some similarities in a sense because you've got creatures from a distance. You don't really know what they are.

It Comes at Night would probably be the closest similar film, except that if you've ever seen It Comes at Night, it seems like it was a bit of a disappointment without giving away the movie. And then one of my sleeper hit favorites from 10, almost 10 years ago is into the forest. And it had, uh, Ellen page and I forget the other girl in it. It's a really good movie where two girls live in the woods in the forest. Their dad's passed away. They live in a house that's falling down around

them. They're not super prepared, but they do their best. A really good film. Another, another apocalyptic film told from a female point of view. I've actually watched two or three of those recently. Now, is Arcadian a bad film? No. Would it pass the time? Sure. Is it a kind of typical apocalyptic fare? Yeah, I would say all of the above, you know, there's other ones out there that if you haven't seen, they're worth watching, but you know, if you're on a plane and it's available, hell yeah, give it a go. All right. Pippin says no more lens flare. Yes, I agree. That was Transformers, right? I think. Gunfighter says the creatures are so weird looking in that movie. I'm not sure which movie might be talking about Cloverfield or might be

talking about Arcadian. And if it's in Arcadian, I didn't really talk about the creatures. They definitely have a look like the quiet place, but the noise they make is like, I don't know how to explain it. Do you guys remember? Of course you do, but you know, especially before our time, but the little, you would wind them up and they look like a set of dentures and they would walk across the floor and they go clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. That's what these creatures look like. But it's a little bit off-putting. And I mean it in a nice way. So if you get a chance, watch it.

It's definitely, you know, probably not worth spending $20 to rent it. Just wait for it to come out on streaming and watch it from there. So there you go. All right, what's next, folks? Now you stay on the back roads and you keep your gun handy. Our country is still full of thieving, murdering patriots. Get ready for I read it on the internet.

All right, guys, this is where we take a look at the front page of the internet, where I read it on the internet. And this is really in this it's where we take a look at the front page of the internet where I read it on the internet. And this is really in this, it's where we take a look at our preppers. And that is the biggest forum on Reddit for the preparedness minded folks. I take it, I take a look, I sort by new and I sort by top of this week. And I found two interesting ones, both fairly short. So let's dive into them. First one here is from Skyrim Proposal. Says, I'm disappointed with my response to danger. Prepping for Tuesday, they said. I was swimming with my family and someone remarked that my hair was funny and they wanted

to take a picture. They said it was standing up. I automatically tried to smooth it down and they laughed. That didn't help at all. I just got out of the lake and my hair was wet. I was confused. I looked to my sister. I and my hair was wet. I was confused. I looked to my sister. I saw her hair was standing up. It's exactly what you would expect when lightning's

about to strike. I was very disappointed in my response. I told my family to get out of the water and to follow me. I told them the air was charged and that we will be hit by lightning if we don't move. They were oddly reluctant. It took a bit, but they followed. I'm glad about that reaction. I was calm. I didn't startle my young nephew, but all I could remember about how to deal with this situation is not being the tallest thing in the area. So I led them to a tree. Not a good idea. Please read up on how to avoid being struck by lightning. I feel bad that my reaction could have harmed them even more. I could have forced them into the car, but they were reluctant to even move from the beach. There was a huge clap of thunder. The charge was gone. I felt sick. I didn't even consider the other families in the water.

I should have screamed they needed to leave the water, but just focused on my family. No one was hurt, but they could have been. My sister joked about the fact that I didn't warn people and it haunts me. Well, I'm going to say first off that I think they did really, really well. They got themselves out of the water. They got their family out of the water, despite the fact that the family didn't really want to go along with it. Sometimes that's all you can do. And I think if he'd have stood there hollering, most folks would have just been like, yeah, I'm not listening to you now. Did he panic and forget some things in the middle of it? Sure. Uh, the, the reason I shared this is because I remember 10 years ago when we first moved out

here, we got caught in a freak hail thunderstorm, middle of the day, hot day. And I wanted to get out of the way of the hail. And so I was like, well, where do I go? I look around. I didn't know the area. We're in a small town and I saw a big green elevator. And so like, well, let's go park under that, which is basically a lifted silo. And so here I am literally sitting underneath of a lightning rod. And, um, we're there for about five minutes. I think this is a really dumb place to park, Tim. So I look around really quick and I see a self-serve car wash and I go over, I pull in there, wait for the rain and the hail to pass. But for a moment, yeah, did something pretty stupid, right? There you go. But it happens. But right here, self-divide. This is where a fellow member of the R-Preppers tried to make them feel a little better. But order of priorities, protect yourself, protect your family, protect your community. If your

family wasn't cooperating, you weren't yet free to worry about other people at the beach. I like that. At any rate, nobody was harmed. And now you have a test scenario to learn from. Frame it as a success. Now, what are the chances that this person's ever going to have to deal with that kind of situation again? Probably slim to none, but just, you know, don't beat yourself up over something. Again, nobody was hurt. Take it as a learning lesson and move on. Simple as that. All right, next story. This one comes from our preppers again, and these are both response articles. This one said, how do you respond to hearing gunshots? Now, get this in your mind as we're listening. Think, how do you respond when you hear gunshots? Because I know when I was in Tennessee, just chilling at the property one day, three or four different people from up and down the, the laneway, I guess, in different places

were letting off, uh, gunshots all kind of at the same time. And I, I assumed it was something they just did. It didn't, um, you know, it wasn't off-putting or anything like that. But how do you react? So here we are. I was hanging out at a friend's apartment. We were all mostly sitting on the floor. We heard gunshots. It sounded very close, like it could have been in my backyard. Everybody kept it casual, but I was surprised by the differences in reactions amongst the

group. My immediate reaction was to lie down against the couch. So it was between me and the window, the wall, in the direction of the gunshots. A girl there from Brazil started putting on her shoes. She later explained that it was so she could run if needed since the driveway was gravel. Our two Pakistani friends just stayed where they were. They were surprised me and the Brazilian reacted at all. We all grew up in cities where hearing gunshots were normal,

but a normal response was different between us. It's been a few weeks, but I'm still thinking about how cultural responses to emergencies can be so different. I like that. I just thought this was kind of an interesting story. Says, thanks for all the interesting replies. For more context, we live in a very safe, small town in the rural area in the U.S. You never hear shooting in town. I talked about this more with one of my Pakistani friends who grew up in Hyderabad, who said she didn't react because from her perspective, it's a super safe area. So anyhow, interesting, uh, this dude where he grew up in a city, got nervous, put himself between, you know, cover and concealment. Now, again, a coach, Chesterfield, a sofa is not going to protect you a whole lot, but it's still better. You know, you're putting levels of protection between you. So at this point, you've got a drywall,

probably an exterior wall. So you got siding, some sort of sheathing, insulation, which will do almost nothing, and then drywall, and then a couch between you. So that's something. I really like the idea of the Brazilian lady who put her shoes on. She's like, yep, I'm used to it. I mean, she probably grew up in the land of where, if you guys have ever seen Brazilian off-duty cop videos, yeah, they crack me up, man. Rachel Brown says, when you live out in the boonies, it happens all the time. Absolutely it does. And again, there's your difference. Hearing a bunch of gunshots in the country, not probably going to make you nervous. Hearing a bunch of gunshots in the middle of the city, possibly going to make you nervous. Here it is. And L2 Survive says, I live out of the city. When I hear gunshots, I wonder if I just made a new friend.

Did we just become best friends? Yep, I think we did. Anybody know that quote? But yeah, you're right. Exactly. Another way to find like-minded folks, right? Just follow your ears instead of your nose. Few Knees 9451 says, I agree with all your friends' responses.

For me, if I'm at my house and hear gunshots, it's only an issue if my dog alerts, then I know it's too close. I'll live with that. This one here. Having spent most of my adult life in a dense city, I come to realize that most gunshots are not in fact gunshots. They are fireworks, especially in the June to August area. So if I hear one, I'm listening for the pattern. A single one and no follow-up, I'm not going to worry about it. A slow series of them, fireworks. I'm listening for quick bursts of a shootout along with squealing tires or screaming. I've been around one shooting that I know of and it was anything but quiet. Everyone was screaming or shouting. A lot of it depends on how much noise can carry where you are. My host is on a bit of a hill so we can hear fireworks from quite a ways away. The sound right outside, but if

I actually go back for them, they're usually out on the beach a good distance away. They sound right outside, but if I actually go back for them, they're usually out on the beach a good distance away. And this one here, South African here, it's become a common occurrence. Few gunshots every few nights. We do see cops patrolling every night and private security are out in force. We stopped relying on police though. If it concerns anyone, they'll just post a button on the WhatsApp group with the private security guys and they'll check it out. Anyhow, in the city, again, I like that thought that some people downplayed the idea of gunshots in these articles. And this is kind of where I differ with our preppers perspective sometimes, because despite their name of prepper being taken from being prepared quite often, they downplay most things almost to their detriment, I think, but

I don't disagree with, if you hear a noise, listen for a repetitive noise, listen for blood curdling screams, listening for ambulance tires screeching. That's what you're looking for, because if it's fireworks, you might hear somebody hooting and hollering and carrying on. And then it takes a minute or two to light another one and it goes off. So just pay attention. Keep your eyes, you know, your eyes and your ears in the game, folks. All right. What do we got next for you? Here we go. Nothing like eating under an open sky, even if it is radioactive. Dropping the dime on precious metals. sky, even if it is radioactive. Dropping the dime on precious metals.

All right, this is one there hasn't been a ton in the precious metals industry lately. I guess it's because it's summer, people are on vacation, it's warm. However, there was a vault for precious metal storage built in Idaho the other day that now eclipses Fort Knox. It is the largest precious metals repository in the United States, privately owned by a private metals company. This comes from Idaho 6 News. Money Metals opens Idaho-based gold depository larger than Fort Knox. Right here we go. This is a pretty short article, but after three years of planning and construction, Money Metals has opened its state-of-the-art 37,000 square foot vaulting and fulfillment facility in Eagle, Idaho. This is kind of cool guys. Nestled in the base of the Boise foothills, Money Metals high security gold and silver storage compound, costs 28 million to construct, has the capacity to hold

upwards of 100 billion in gold and silver, and can be further expanded to 60,000 square feet. I want to slide back to Gunfighter here because I wanted to talk about this. It's not hard to surpass Fort Knox. All you need is one pallet of gold. They spend all our money already. Ain't that the truth? Yeah, totally. Whenever I think of Fort Knox, all you need is one pallet of gold. They spend all our money already. Ain't that the truth? Yeah, totally. I, whenever I think of Fort Knox, I think I learned about Fort Knox from Looney Tunes when I was a kid, they always used to talk about it on there. And I was like, what the heck is that? Just kind of interesting that a private gold holding facility was built and it is the largest in North America. Yeah. So let's check this out. And the cool thing is it's a fairly new company built on a three acre lot adjacent to city and county police and

emergency services. It offers an extremely secure location for individuals, businesses, families, governments. So I guess they're also going to be a storage facility, not just a shipping facility. Embedded in the facility are advanced security measures, around-the-clock monitoring, secure access controls, a security team composed of armed former law enforcement and military personnel, and third-party audits and insurance to ensure the highest standards. And right here, since its founding in 2010, Money Metals has expanded dramatically, establishing itself as one of the leading precious metal dealers in North America. I didn't really know them. I don't know, have any of you guys dealt with Money Metals at all? Because I haven't. But it looks like,

see if I can find the number here somewhere, but they're looking at doing, I think it's around 40,000 gold and silver transactions a month. There it is. Money Matters currently delivers as many as 40,000 gold and silver orders each month and has already served nearly three quarters of a million customers in North America. Kind of cool. I didn't even know this was something that happened. They have an A-plus rating on the Better Business Bureau, and I guess they want to offer off-site storage. Not my cup of tea. Hey, if you're into it and you want to store your gold and silver or whatever, uh, offsite, all the power to you. But for me now I'm going to do it locally. And I mean, very locally, if you know what I mean,

but yeah, kind of cool. Kind of neat that it's in Idaho, of course, beautiful freedom, loving country, uh, anyhow, state country, whatever you want to call it. All right. What do we got next? Next is the Faraday Cage, and I don't have a cool stinger clip for this segment yet, but it is where we take a quick look at technology, something interesting. You guys ever seen that movie Pulse? It was actually a remake of a Japanese film, like all horror movies in the early 20s, 2000s was. It starred Kristen Bell and it was a virus that could, or maybe, I guess maybe virus isn't the right word, maybe more like, I don't know, satanic creatures, spirits, I don't know, that could pass through cell phone signals.

So anyway, at the end of the movie, in order for them to escape, and it's 20 years old and it's not a very good movie, so I'm going to spoil the hell out of it they have to go to a cell free or a radio quiet zone in order to survive and so i've always been rather interested in these radio quiet zones and i don't know if you guys have seen them but the two big ones have you know high tech what do we got let me show you i've got some satellite dishes, some radio observatory, astronomical, that kind of stuff. So here it is. Radio quiet zones feature prominently on Starlink's official availability map. So if you can see this, I know it's a little bit small there, but there's two large black areas where Starlink currently cannot handle, cannot bring in

any service or signal. Because again, if you live there, if you want to look, go down the rabbit hole and look at what's required of people who live in those areas, because again, sensitive radio equipment. So this week, Starlink is coming to radio quiet zones in the US. Leave it to Elon Musk to figure it out. SpaceX has found a way to bring Starlink satellite internet access to radio quiet zones in West Virginia and North New Mexico without disturbing the observatories. Kind of cool. And so I wanted to know how they did it. Here it is. Radio quiet zones feature prominently on Starlink's official availability map as a pair of dark blue areas without access. SpaceX wants to avoid radio interference with local observatories. And right here, the main concern has been Starlink beaming radio signals toward the eye of the radio astronomy observatories,

which could both interfere and even damage the equipment. To prevent this, SpaceX developed a system to quickly steer the satellite beams away from the radio telescopes. So basically, uh, the gist of the story is, uh, shared information between Starlink and the observatories. And as the satellites pass into phase of the, uh, the dishes, they're going to kind of move or rotate the beam so that they don't interfere. Be interesting to see how well it works and holds up. But either way, kind of a cool story. I like the fact that, uh, I just picture Elon in his office. He's like, nope, can't do it. Don't want those two black dots on the map. We need to cover 100% in North America. So he's like, who do I know? So he calls somebody up at the radio observatory and he's like, yep, we're going

to pipe in internet signals. And they're like, you can't do it. Don't tell me you can't, we're going to figure it out. And so we did. And yeah, so there you go. Kind of cool. Hey guys. All right. Next is this week in the workshop. And this is where we take a look at, I guess the shit I got done this week. And for anybody, whoever asks, why do you do that, Tim? Well, two reasons, accountability and hopefully inspiration as well. This was a very, the last seven days centered around one big project for us and I'll fill you in on it, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, really blown away with the finished product, but we spent the entire week upgrading the playground area at the Busy Bees South in Lloydminster. So when we bought the place, the inside of the building was in good shape. We had a good staff there, but the lady who owned

the place really did not do anything with the outdoor. She let it really go downhill. It was just in horrible shape. So basically what you got a picture is the play area. And then it was the play area was up by about 22 inches from the paved area. So you had what was supposed to be grass and then you had pavement below that. No stairs, no railing. The entire 40 some foot run was a sloped mud hill. It was deadly and dangerous. The staff had to fight with mud 24 seven. If it was dry, it was dust. And if it was wet, it was mud. It was awful. And we needed the time to tear it apart and fix it. So we shut down our daycares for a week this summer to give our staff vacation. And during that week, we spent four days, myself and my son

in law, and one day with my son as well. We rented some really cool equipment. We rented what is known as a Toro Dingo, which is like a tiny version of a skid steer. Did a ton of dirt work. We built a retaining wall. We put in stairs. We laid sod. We brought, I guess, only about five yards of soil. Ton of lumber. We drilled.

We dug. We used expanding foam for the wall supports. Just had a hell of a time. Spent way too much time in the sun, but when it was done, wow, guys, so proud of it. The parents are stoked. The staff love it. It's way safer for the kids. And it was something that every time licensing would come through for the daycare, they would put it on there. This needs to be dealt with. And we knew it needed to be. We just needed a week of uninterrupted access to the playground area. So really proud that we got that done. Got to learn a new skill of, or at least I guess it'd be a new skill. And I also got to teach my son-in-law the same skill of how to use the Dingo. A lot of fun, uh, it was a project where I was able to

bring together a ton of disparate skills that I've learned over the years. Now we'd originally talked to a local company, a couple of guys really, who were just up and coming. We hired them to pressure wash everything out back. They did a good job with that. And then we said, Hey, this is what we want. We want to build a retaining wall. We want to put in stairs. And he came back with, I'm not going to do that. I want to slope the entire area. So we were going to end up with, Oh, it was bad. Instead of having just a single slope, he then wanted to turn the entire play area into a sloped bowl, which would have been even more deadly, even more dangerous, slippery, just horrible. And he wouldn't take no for an answer. So I said, okay, guess what? Um, we're going to

do the project. So it ended up me and Kurt working on it for those four days. We saved busy bees around $7,000. So I was pretty damn proud of that. We decided to go with live sod instead of AstroTurf that probably saved us $4,000. And then we saved at least, man, after you figure in my time and Kurt's time, we still save three to $4,000 in wages in labor. So anyway, it's done. I will, I have some before and afters. I'll post them to Instagram tomorrow. And yeah, we also rented a healthy jackhammer. So get this guys. Some days I wouldn't have any luck if it weren't for bad luck.

And we decided we had five holes that we needed the jackhammer through the asphalt. And then, you know, rotor down with the auger to get the holes built. So I just picked randomly. I'm like, all right, let's start in the middle right here. Hole number three, I start jackhammering and all of a sudden I feel my bit getting kind of grabbed a hold of or sucked in. The more I jackhammer, the harder it gets pinned in there. And I'm like, what is going on? I've never dealt with this before. So I discover that there used to be a retaining wall there at one time or another, and there were some old four by sixes in the ground. And we managed to hit, in all the holes,

we only hit one. And the one we hit was the very first hole that I drilled into. And we then needed to spend a half an hour extracting the jackhammer bit from that. You would not think that an old rotten four by six could hold onto a jackhammer bit like this, but it sure did. It was awful. And it was a hot day and we were at the tail end of our work day. We were just beat. So when it was done, I was so happy to be done with it, but it was a hell of a job guys. Huh? What else? Uh, we got overheated on Sunday. It was awful. We had, and then yesterday I was up at Lloyd working in the daycare again. We had a horrible wildfire smoke. I was telling you guys about that. It makes it really difficult to work and enjoy. But the worst part was I wanted to hang

a new baby gate. I go out to my truck and I'd forgotten my tool bag, left it in Provost an hour and a half away. So I was hooped. I had to come up with something else. So I decided I was going to hang the new ring cameras that we bought. And if you guys have never used or installed ring cameras before, they are, they're definitely interesting. Very, very slick to set up.

Yeah, I know they're, what are they, Amazon? Or, yeah, I think they are Amazon anyway. I enjoyed them. They're a very slick interface. Their battery, they run on two Energizer lithium AA batteries, and they supposedly get you two years of runtime on them. We'll see. Don't really know, but we'll find out.

Dan says, I'd have called it bits dead, let her rest, dump the dirt right here, boys. So that reminds me, I wanted to mention, I don't know the dude's name, but the guy that delivered the sod probably saved us two to three hours worth of work. He came in with a truck and a little mini forklift that unloaded it. He came in with a truck and a little mini forklift that unloaded it. He was willing to come in all the way in through the narrow opening of the, the backyard and then go up the ramp, the dirt ramp that was sketchy as shit and put all of the sod up where we needed to work with it. It was such a back saving thing.

I thank him for that. So, and, uh, um, Dan says ring with a solar panel was a game changer. I believe it. I've got some wifi solar, uh, solar powered cameras that I love right now. And of course, whenever I install a new system, the first thing I do is go online and look for cool accessories and they have got some solar and some battery extenders for the ring systems. So I'm going to dig into them because they're really good. We're putting them in the daycare in the shared public or the shared common areas, not the classrooms themselves. We need to have them. And so, yeah, I've been impressed with the quality, the ease of installation so far. This week, as far as videos go, I threw out a video on, do I need a remote start generator?

I was actually, I started out planning on doing a review of the new dual fuel inverter generator from Harbor Freight. And I realized that I had put so much work into whether you needed or didn't need a remote starter that that turned into its own video. So a couple of weeks down the road, look for the new, the new, uh, review of the dual fuel generator. And then coming tomorrow is my latest and greatest favorite piece of DeWalt gear. It's a storage box. That's also a dual charger. It's been out on the market for a couple of years, but I just bought it. So it's like called the DeWalt storage box charger. It holds 14 DeWalt batteries, has two chargers built in.

It's been super nice for all the work I do when I go up to the daycares and need to bring a bunch of batteries with me. And finally, two EMP shields finally showed up this week. Been a while. I had planned on ordering them sooner and I hadn't got around to it, but they're going to be going on the bubblegum pink and the army green Rams that we now have. So yeah, keep an eye out down the road for yet another EMP shield video on that. What do we got next? All right. The community mailbag. Here we go. It's the apocalypse in of days, the judgment day. The end of the world, my friend.

Let's dig into the community mailbag. Guys, the community mailbag or community nailbag. This is where we reach in and find the things that were sent to me this week. And what I wanted to share with you is a couple of the polls I run on the community tab on the YouTube channel. And we are very quickly approaching 20,000 subscribers over there too, which is kind of cool or over here, I should say. But the one poll, the big one here, what is your go-to bunker entertainment? 106 votes, 22% said board games. I thought that would have been higher, except that, uh, sometimes that leads to physical altercations and we don't need that.

38% said books and 28% said movies. So there you go. Um, and then the other one I asked was, have you ever had to evacuate your home? 92 votes on that one. And, uh, this was, I mean, this was probably one of my favorite polls that I've done in a long time. And the main reason was, is that I got to hear some really, um, I guess, legitimate stories from folks who have had to evacuate over the years. I didn't necessarily, I was just looking for a yes or no answer, but a ton of people shared some stuff. So this first one comes from Hans Zarkov, PhD said hurricane Florence put six feet of water in my backyard, flooding my storage shed workshop back porch mist coming in my house by the height of one brick watching river

flood forecast for Debbie right now already have a storage unit and have started moving equipment to get ahead of it. Again, the little, the little things guys that are so scary. I'm not sure if this is the same Dan or not. It could be Dan, Dan, Dan DeColo. I hope I pronounced that right. Said I've never had to evacuate, but this does make me a little nervous. Previously, I'd thought that I would be able to go to my aging parents house if I had to bug out or vice versa. But several years ago, I happened to buy a house that is eight houses down the road from my aging parents. Since I am only an only child, this makes sense to be close to help them. But at the same time, anything that affects me affects them. Power outages and the like need to rethink the plan. Yep. That's the odd thing, isn't it? You

know, you, because again, you totally made the right choice living near your aging parents. I would, would not begrudge you that anything, but then all of a sudden you're like, shit, where do I bug out to? Where do they bug out to if things happen? Right. So yeah, we're, uh, we have a few plans we've worked on here. I mean, obviously if we ever have to leave way, way, way too far away, then we're going to Tennessee or vice versa, but we're working on something else a little closer locally. And I'll, I'll share with you guys that as we get into the next little project we're doing. Next comes from Catbab, said, as a child, I had to evacuate during what they called the flood of 64. Yozik said, a few times here, Hurricane Opal and Biloxi, I think, is that

Missouri, MS, or Mississippi? Oh, you guys are going to hate me because I'm bad with my US geography. Widespread powder outage once. Another hurricane in Biloxi, forget which one, had a tornado touchdown in the parade field while doing training in the military. Had to evacuate. Lots of fun stuff. Wow. And this one comes from Dirt Poor Homestead. Never had to, but I did bug in for a three-day power outage in a snowstorm. Actually stayed home for two or three days multiple times due to snow. So not to jinx it or anything, but if you guys have noticed, you know, I don't, I do a ton of generator videos and it kind of sucks because, well, no, sorry, back up here, Tim. We don't have,

we have almost no power outages here on the prairies. It's unbelievable how rare it happens. So I don't get a ton of real world experience with my generators, but growing up on the East coast where blizzards and nasty storms are the norm, quite often we would be storm stayed for two, three, four days at a time with no power using wood heat and enjoying ourselves. Becky misses that quite often. She talks about how she used to love when we'd be storm stayed for a blizzard and we would just stay home and enjoy life. It was definitely a different time. User Great ZX something or other carbon dioxide alarm from cooking of all things. And then Carl Payne says it was a gas leak. So yeah, crazy.

So if any of you guys have ever had to evacuate for something, let me know. I definitely enjoyed hearing those stories from folks. It was, yeah, I feel bad that it happened. But if someone else can learn from your experience, all the power to you. And then one final segment for this evening, guys, and it is my food for thought segment. And that has become kind of the, I don't know, not always the topic to end on, but it's just my area where I can interject something I've been thinking about, something I've been keeping notes on on my phone, but it's not big enough to warrant an entire episode or an entire YouTube video. But this one's on physical media. And if you like, I asked you guys earlier this week,

what is your go to bunker media? And it's a bit of a joke. But at the same time, it's also not. Because you guys remember back to the start of the craziness that was COVID that turned out to be not quite what we thought it was. Well, for a couple of months, we spent every waking minute at home and we played board games and we played card games and we had a hell of a time with the family, really enjoyed it. And I've turned into a bit of a physical media junkie over the last five, six years, right over this shoulder right here is my vinyl record player. And I've got about two crates worth of records now. I enjoy them. I actually have Post Malone's new country album pre-ordered. That should be coming soon for some of the people can just kind of roll your eyes

if you want, but that's okay. So anyway, I enjoy music. I really do. But our first love as a family has always been film. And we've decided over the last while when we were down in Tennessee, we went to some of the thrift stores and we bought dollar DVDs and some Blu-rays and we just bought a stack of them and we put them on a shelf at the cabin, which is great. But for us, we wanted to have a fairly robust Blu-ray collection here at the house. And how did this start? Well, it all started back about six months ago. Me and the girls had kind of, you know, if Becky was out of town, we would pick a day where we would be like, all right, I'm going to show you guys a movie.

And so we started with American Pie. I know. I showed them the, uh, the jackass films. I showed them Dazed and Confused, which is probably one of our joint favorite films now. And so one day I said, all right, well, let's watch 28 Days Later. Well, I typed it into Just Watch and it said, sorry, it's not available. I thought, oh, well, I guess we can't stream it. I'll have to rent it somewhere. So I looked and you couldn't rent it on YouTube. You couldn't rent it on Amazon, Apple, nothing. It wasn't available.

I was like, well, what the hell? Can I buy it as a digital download? Nope, not available anywhere. So that made me think, how many more movies are like this? And I didn't go down that rabbit hole a whole lot. But the fact that we live in this kind of instant on, want to stream something, but can't, kind of, you know, it reminded me that things that we take for granted can be pulled away instantly. And also on top of it, I'd love to be able to be more prepared. And I'd love to have, I was picturing a whole, remember those binders full of DVDs and stuff. So I'd like to have a good collection of movies that we could watch during a prolonged power outage or a grid

down scenario. Simple as that. Now, could you fill a hard drive or USB thumb drive? Sure you could. But for me, I wanted something physical and tangible. So that was where I went on eBay looking for 28 Days Later in Blu-ray, I was hoping. Well, it was basically only available in DVD and it was almost $100 for a desk. And I thought, holy shit. So over the next few months, as we would yard sale in the spring and the summer, I started looking and eventually snapped up two copies on DVD. Now the thing about 28 days later is it was filmed in some of the early digital, uh, digital video cameras. So the quality is never going to be high definition. It's kind of like the old Star Trek, the next generation that was

filmed on video. You're never going to get an upscaled without it being completely refilmed. Anyway, I digress. So that's where this whole thing started. And a couple of weeks ago, we sat down and we watched 28 Days Later as a family, and it was a lot of fun. It was an experience. It was so different than, this is going to sound weird, but if you guys remember the days of when you would go to, for me, it was Long Branch rental. That was the local family owned rental place, but it didn't matter what it was, whether it was blockbuster or family video, whatever it was for you. So we sit down and you physically put the disc in the machine. My girls did not know that you could watch a physical disc without an internet connection.

It blew them out of the water. They had no idea. The sound is better. The video is better. You're not contingent on some licensing rights with another company. And they were blown away by the special features on the DVD. I had forgotten about the special features. I had forgotten about the special features. I hadn't realized what we had lost by sliding into the streaming era. And there was so much that we lost. And without waxing eloquently all night, we, you know, we had lost the tangible end of it. We lost the social end of going to the store and renting a video. And really what we end up doing most of the time now is we sit down and we're like, all right, let's find something on Netflix. And we stroll through seven different streaming sites and we don't find anything. And then we go to bed. We just play on our phones.

But you know, when you physically put a movie in, you sit down, everybody for the most part puts their phone down. You sit there, it becomes a discussion point. It was an event. We had a hell of a time. So that's where we're heading toward. We're going to watch birds next Hitchcock, and then we'll probably watch psycho. We've got a bunch of them. And then the other day I asked Charlotte, I said, do you want to watch, uh, back to the future? And she said, I'd love to. So onto Amazon, I went and I bought the trilogy for 30 bucks. So all that to say that prepping, you know, you've heard it said many, many times that prepping should make your life better, whether the shit hits the fan or it doesn't. And so that's the way I look at this physical media thing.

You know, for me, my vinyl is just something I enjoy down here in my office. Would it be great if I needed it sometime? Sure, it would be. Movies, same thing. I like something physical and tangible that we can sit down and enjoy as a family, but it also doubles as a really good prep as well. So if that helps me sleep at night, I don't know, I guess it does. But yeah. So if you guys want to share, if you're listening to this after the fact, you want to share some thoughts on physical media or physical things in general, like books, whatever it happens to be, I'd love to hear about it. So those are my thoughts. That is my food for thought on physical media, our need for it,

maybe looking through some, you know, rose colored nostalgia glasses, but either way, I feel like it's something that we need to at least consider. And physical media is dirt cheap. And again, it allows you to be one arm's length away from the control that some of the streaming sites have now. So there you go. All right. Anyway, folks, that's it for me this evening. It was great having you in here. I think we topped out at 20 live viewers tonight and we're only on YouTube now. It is. This is where we are. This is where we're going to be. I have staked my claim to YouTube. This is my moneymaker. You're going to see more and more review videos coming through. So support the channel, guys. I appreciate you. I just love that you came here. I love that you watch this.

And yeah, heading to the city this weekend with the kids and the girls. Love hanging out with you here on Thursday nights. If you need anything, you know where to find me. Come and join the Telegram group, which is in the link below. And as always, folks, stay happy, stay healthy, and have a great week. Thank you.