Hello everyone! Thanks to melbo for the assist in getting my account created. I'm using privacy-enhancing software, which I'm sure I'll get around to talking more about in the appropriate subforum, so I suppose my M.O. looked more like a spammer to the forum software than a legitimate user. I'm not doing anything illegal, but I don't want Uncle Sam helping himself to my supplies in the event of a declared emergency in my area. So I'll sometimes be a bit ambiguous about the specifics of my location or potentially identifying information. I apologize for that now. Otherwise, I'll try very much to be a helpful & productive member of this forum. I'm an office worker within the city limits of a North American city. My prep work has been going on for years, with some years being better than others. I do have bugout land that I own free & clear. I've got chickens (for eggs), rain barrels, and some other things going for me. My food stores are embarrassingly low right now and I will be correcting that vigorously, so expect some posts on that subject. I've also switched over to a more sustainable diet, which means I'm eating almost entirely plant matter now, plus eggs & cheese, and every now and then I'll have some fish. Other than the fish, I don't kill any animals for my food now. Long term, I suspect this will be more sustainable. I've got my first angora rabbit (a buck) for wool, just small scale right now until I get the hang of it and then will add does. I am married with children. All of my kids are home schooled. In the new year, I'll be building a new workshop behind the house. I've already taken some welding classes, and have built up a collection of wood working and electronics manufacturing/repairing tools. I'll add a welder to the kit after the workshop is up. Aside from storing things up, I do want to be able to manufacture and repair things both for myself and for barter economy purposes. My day job skills will likely not be very relevant in long-term collapse scenario. I have an amateur radio license (forgive me for not sharing my callsign here). I'm also into motorbikes, photography (analog & digital), and some other retro-tech that I think is more stylish, responsible, and sustainable.
Thanks for the welcome. I do apologize for the jumbo paragraph; that's not how I typed it. There's probably some markup I need to learn to get the formatting right.
Welcome strunk. We have a group of privacy minded folks here that use tor. We also have a crypto group that's got a few interesting projects going - We have a surprising amount of Linux users here as I've been encouraging it on the forum since we started survivalmonkey in '05. Oh, that spam checker looks at IP, selected username and email address. It occasionally does get triggered by a tor IP.
Yessir, I'm indeed using Tor. There is another big survivalist forum that I tried joining before I found this one and I had the same problem. The admin of that site hasn't responded to my request for assistance in getting set up, but you were very helpful over here in getting me past the doorman. The only real remaining gotcha with using this forum is the use of http as opposed to https, which permits sniffing/tampering by Tor exit nodes and other malicious third parties. But I very much want to participate so I'm accepting the risk. I'm pretty well versed in Linux and some other UNIX operating systems, so we'll probably run into each other in those conversations.
