Hand Me My Short Sword, Pard!

So I'm sitting around watching Gladiator for the umpteenth time...what we do in life echoes in eternity...I like seige engines...I wish I had a small one in front of the Secret Hidden Bunker...I would shell the town post office until the barbarians surrendered, then it would be sack and loot time! Although given where I live, I suppose the loot would be a souvenir t-shirt and a stash of medicinal marijuana. To be sure, sacking isn't what it used to be.

I'd like to shoot a match tomorrow, but there are a couple of impediments, not the least of which is that there's not a match and it's snowing out tonight. Thusly, I will sleep late tomorrow, then run the reloading machine for a while. I've been thinking about doing some experimenting with the .44 Russsian cartridge...Hamilton Bowen claims it's super accurate when specifically chambered, as opposed to shooting it in a .44 Special or .44 Magnum. I've got a thousand rounds of Black Hills .44 Russian somewhere around here.

In the meanwhile, io9 has a handy guide to making ones' self apocalypse-ready...first, learn to make fire!

Have you ever watched one of those seasons of Survivor where one of the tribes can't figure out how to build a fire, and they don't win the flint for days and days? They can't cook their food or boil their water, and they fade fast, growing weak and ineffective until the producers take pity and slip them a Zippo when no one's looking. If you can't build a fire, you'll die.

Once you've got fire, start work on a decent catapult...