New book by a member: Practical Doomsday

Hey folks - I'm a long-time regular here, for many years posting under the username of /u/fut-. You might know me from stuff like the hyperinflation gallery, an in-depth introduction to two-way radios for preppers, or an older feature-length guide titled Doomsday Planning for Less Crazy Folk.

For the past several months, I've been working on Practical Doomsday: a book focusing on what I like to call joyful resiliency - having plans that let you detach from 24-hour news and and that pay off even if the apocalypse doesn't come. It also emphasizes focusing on simple, tractable scenarios, rather than doing down the rabbit hole of doomsday porn. I think this approach is popular on /r/preppers, so I figured some folks might enjoy it.

I took care to unearth a ton of relevant data and research, sometimes to dispel some of the popular survivalist tropes; for example, there are around 40 pages dealing just with financial preparedness, focusing not just on tired approaches such as gold or Bitcoin, but also on the use of equities or commodity futures options as a way to hedge against monetary crises with greater fidelity. To give you another example of things we probably get wrong: did you know that many anthropologists believe that the apocryphal barter economies were never a thing, and by extension, are very unlikely to make a comeback in the event of any sort of an economic collapse?

The book also features also a meaty section on online safety, written from the perspective of someone who spent the past 20 years working in this industry, dealing with some of the folksy beliefs around VPNs, password hygiene, and so forth, and discussing the ecosystem of data brokers - something that doesn't really get talked about here very much.

If this sounds interesting, the publisher has a somewhat tongue-in-cheek sample chapter available for free. Print book release date is a bit out, but preorders from the publisher give you early access to the chapters in PDF form. For folks who review books on their blogs or elsewhere, I can hook you up with a reviewer copy, too - just PM me, no strings attached (i.e., no embargos and you're welcome to pan the book if you hate it).