“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
— Robert A. Heinlein
Welcome. I’m still busy adding content here, and making that a priority over cosmetics for the time being, so no pretty pictures of sunsets and palm trees yet, sorry.
I’m Robert the Wombat.. or at least the current Robert the Wombat. Don’t tell anyone, and I’m sure you didn’t guess, but that’s not my real name. In fact, it’s more of a title than a name. Someday I may even pass it on to a new Robert the Wombat, and thus the legend of The Dread Wombat Robert will become immortal.
Well, maybe not.
I have wildly diverse interests (some think to the point of eccentricity… and beyond), and even though I’ve narrowed it down to just a few of those here many of the relationships between the subjects I’ve chosen aren’t likely to be obvious. I could have restricted the blog to one subject, and the resistance to a mult-subject blog is such that I may eventually be forced to break it up, but I think that would be a loss, because the connections between very diverse subjects are themselves very instructive and valuable. On the other hand I could have picked a lot more, with even more non-obvious connections between them, but these are the ones that I’ve been spending the most time on lately, and it is much easier and more natural for me to supply content on the most current of my interests:
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Survival: Equipment, preparation, EDC (every-day carry), fundamentals (edged tools and fire), a lot more. I have more interest and knowledge personally about urban-suburban short-term scenarios, but also have a lot of experience backpacking, camping, and sailing (which can become a survival situation very quickly). I expect the focus to be on practicality and enhancing very general personal capabilities. See the Heinlein quote above.
Maker & Technology: I’ve been a professional programmer for a very long time, amateur before that, but I also have an intense interest in the “Maker” movement and DIY, doing useful things with Raspberry Pi, Arduinos and similar. I used to “build” PCs, I’m equipped and not afraid to wire-wrap, solder, or learn new programming languages.
MGTOW: “Men Going Their Own Way”. The core of this movement, and it is a movement, not an organization with rules, no matter how many websites claim to have the rules and how many almost-unresearched articles repeat them. At its core, stripped of the anger and hurt and lashing of men who have found that society has betrayed them, it is just about self-ownership and self-defense in an age where men are the last demographic that can be mocked, ridiculed, portrayed disparagingly in media, reviled, demonized, discriminated against, legislated against and falsely accused of evil motives and acts with complete impunity. There are serious ongoing discussions as to whether men should have equal rights, or even any rights to have their own opinion or make their own decisions, especially with regard to gender issues, marriage and procreation. Men are now, whether they realize it or not, in a battle to avoid becoming second-class citizens in the societies that they built, and there is no indication that the forces working against them will stop there if they succeed… but society as a whole is still somehow completely mystified that so many men, whether they are clearly conscious of their motivations or not, are just “going Galt” and removing themselves from no-win situations in rapidly increasing numbers. Men need a new path through the completely-changed landscapes they now face, and they are starting to make that path for themselves, this time with less regard for social expectation.
Men Cooking: Cooking is a primary,essential long-term survival skill.
Every human culture on earth cooks, and it turns out that there is considerable evidence that there is very good reason for that, that we are physically evolved to eat cooked food, and are thus cyborgs- our physical structure is evolved around and dependent on our technology.
I don’t mean for the title of this subject to exclude anyone with an interest, but men in general lack the same cultural support in learning to cook that women enjoy, and, at least judging by the typical cookbooks out there, men learn very differently. It is very hard to find instruction in cooking that would qualify as even mediocre compared to the instruction available in most technical fields, and cooking is an inherently technical operation… and an exercise in survival skills, even if it may also, at its highest level, be art.
IMHO all men should be able to cook, should learn to cook for themselves if they don’t know how, do it well and take pride in it, instead of accepting society’s message that this is one area where being completely incompetent is just fine because they’re men. Think about what that last point really means in terms of your independence. Cooking is a real survival issue with or without “survival scenarios”, and we’ll discuss why. It is also, or should be, a MGTOW/gender issue. It is, very literally, being able to feed yourself.
How independent can you ever be, how prepared to survive can you claim to be, if you must depend on parents, a spouse, professional cooks or corporate factories just to prepare your food for you to eat?
We’ll discuss all of this, with practical techniques, recipes and and resources.
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Back in the 80s I ran an “electronic bulletin board system” (BBS), one of the little dial-in computer communities we built when Internet access was still rare and exotic, and I am a programmer. Even so, I have little background in web stuff, and none with WordPress, so there’s a fairly steep learning curve. So far it all seems very straightforward, just a lot of detail to cope with, so I hope to have things looking and working better here as time goes by.
I’m an intensely private person by nature, so despite the fact that this place can’t help but reflect my viewpoint and my “voice”, I really don’t want it to be about me personally, I want it to be about ideas. That’s one of the reasons why my name isn’t flying from the masthead. I look forward to civil feedback, and possibly, eventually, other contributors. We live in interesting times, for better and worse, but there are a LOT of ideas out there to be excited about. I think this might, maybe, be quite a ride.
Whether you are a man or a woman or gender 13.5, whether you agree with me on anything or adamantly disagree, so long as you’re willing to be civil about it you’re completely welcome here.
If you don’t say something, chances are that no human will ever know you were here. Go ahead and share anything you like in the guestbook (menu at the top of each page), you don’t even have to register.
– Robert the Wombat