Shade or Die: Hacking Water, Fans, Metal, and Shade to Survive Corporal Sunishment TPS-0068

This has definitely been the most brutally hot day of the year so far.

There are gonna be a lot more like it and a lot worse than it.

But clocked in between 110-115F for a number of hours.

There's only so much you can do to psychologically and physically and medically prepare for it. It's a real struggle on a lot of levels.

What's more interesting to say about today, other than it marking the high point of the year so far, is more incidents of people dropping dead out there in these heat waves.

I read this global daily digest of natural and artificial disasters and extreme events. It's a very diverse array of reporting from around the world, different takes on events from local reporters worldwide.

All the major fires and car crashes and infrastructure collapses and leaks and explosions and conflicts and animal attacks and epidemiological outbreaks, pretty much everything that's newsworthy, that's somewhat atrocious or catastrophic.

I read that digest every day, and part of me says, I'm lucky to have made it through today since so many people didn't.

It's almost like an obituary of all the people who were maimed by the horrific technologies of civilization and then some who just had bad luck in terms of encountering wildlife.

I'm lucky to make it through another day, given all that is possible out there.

I'm reducing my technological attack surface for things that could cause me to be crushed under falling debris or in a fiery pile up vehicle accident, or in chemical leak or explosion.

It's easy for it to be out of sight, out of mind, and have normalcy bias that it will never happen to you, and certainly not in your backyard until something does happen.

Now we're in a world where you may drop dead of heat illness on the spectrum of exhaustion, leading to cognitive issues that lead to behavioral toxicity.

You could have survived if you would have just sat down in the shade, but you died because you tried to drive, and now you flew off of a canyon and you're dead.

I think we're gonna have to start doing heat drills, because people's behavior and the cultural public health messaging...

Whether you are a climate change denier, whether you blame industry or not, I guess if you're dead, it doesn't matter what you thought about it, but it might have been good, no matter who you blamed or didn't blame, to consider the possibility that, in response to heat as a threat to your life...you might take a more tactical and strategic approach to it.

I have no choice at this point and my life has become not just survivalism as a hobby. I'm not a professional survivalist sponsored by knife companies and rope companies and long term storage companies. I'm a professional survivalist because my job is to survive one day to the next, if I get fired from that job, that means I'm dead.

So the idea is sometimes just surviving is the whole work day. That's what it means to be productive, having accomplished nothing else in a day, other than simply not being killed by the cycles of nature. You get water, you get food, and in the summer, you get shade.

But I really appreciate the wisdom teachings of the wild animals that I'm a friend to out here now, they teach me so much about the simplicity of just getting by and being grateful to be embodied and have the ability to feast your senses on this world without a whole lot of other expectations and demands or stress.

Kill or be killed in certain circumstances where there's an elegance and grace to that, as in the sense of the law of the Jungle. Luckily for me, I don't have a lot of human physical violence that I have to deal with. That's a blessing. That's rare in this world anymore.

So it's me surviving the elements, that is the threatscape.

This time of the year, since the winter is really not deadly, you would have to really try to die in the winter in this climate where I'm at. It's not gonna kill you unless you really wanna die, unlike the summer where you gotta really, really, really wanna live not to be killed by it.

Onto my third summer now, I don't know if I'm getting stronger or I'm getting weaker on all levels of my being.

I've heard scientific or pseudo scientific pontifications going in either direction that heat exposure kind of degrades you like a battery that won't charge all the way again after it gets overcharged.

I've heard people hypothesize that by training and building up your heat tolerance, you actually become more resilient to it. I would say it's probably both. A lot of how you push yourself through extreme conditions is psychological.

My physicality may be degrading because of this exposure to extreme heat, with very little mitigation for several months out of the year and now into my third year.

Maybe I'm aging faster, or degrading somehow, certainly there are a lot of compounding things after being out here where I feel like I'm being ground into dust.

But was the experiment, that was the mission to see if all of my fantasies and all of my myth of the noble savage type of back to the land rewilding rhetoric actually was livable.

Ideally you would be buffered in the arms of a very skilled and very well adapted tribe of like minded folks, I lack that in this chapter of my life.

I've had it in the past, but we weren't living together through such extreme times, in such extreme place.

I'm doing this very much alone. I don't think I'm biting off too much more than I can chew. I'm certainly only going into the so called beast mode, rarely when there's a storm where I need to go and deploy my rainwater catchment systems so I don't lose but one drop, if I can help it.

That's when I will turn into the Incredible Hulk and go into beast mode and push through whatever back pain and aching joints and heat exhaustion, or cold or whatever, rain, hail...it's gotta be done.

I got the gear for it. I got the mindset for it, and I do it.

Today I discovered a beautiful lizard that was trapped in my island garden inside of the galvanized water stock tank fish pond.

I've seen camel spiders that are pretty big end up in there and fall to a watery grave. There was nothing I could do about that, seeing them already dead, floating in there, and just have to think of it as a treat for the fish.

But this lizard had found its way to climb down my fig tree, down to where all these tiny seedlings were growing up out of the wicking moisture in the pot that the fig tree is in inside of that pond.

This lizard was just chilling right there.

It wasn't dead, it wasn't lying flat. It was actually kind of in a tai chi posture.

I don't wanna say we were communing, but it was very much making eye contact, but very stoic, it seemed to not be very responsive.

I tried to rattle the tank a little bit just to judge whether it was okay. If a critter is doing what it wants to do, I'm not gonna mess with it.

But I do know that there are places that they can get to, sometimes different types of containers, where I know they're not gonna be able to get out on their own.

So that means I gotta go and do whatever it takes to get them out of there.

I've rescued a few things out of there before, it's always kind of a high stakes, because I don't wanna think I'm doing them a favor and then scare them and have them fall in the water.

I may not be able to rescue them effectively and have them die, and then I have to live with. Maybe that sounds petty, or maybe it sounds insignificant, but to me, it means a lot trying to develop a sort of fabric of relations out here where I have a good score card with the way I treat the wildlife and how I interact.

So I would consider it a major failure if I tried to rescue this lizard and failed.

But it was early in the morning when I first saw it, and made that little initial contact from the outside, from several feet away, just to ensure it was alive and it looked like probably what happened was that it climbed down that fig tree, got down into the pot, then maybe had a snack there of some of the seedlings, which I don't mind.

So I don't know how many hours it had been there for, but I didn't know if it was suffering from heat exhaustion from yesterday, or just some kind of shock, or that it expended energy, but it was aware that it had nowhere to go.

I don't think it was there vacationing at that point, and it probably was worried about climbing back up.

I don't know what age I would gauge it at, but from the size of the giant lizards that run around here that are between a foot and a foot and a half long, sometimes...

I see tiny ones. I see big ones, this was a mid size one. I could see how maybe it would have a hard time making its way back up so I said to myself well I'll come, back for it later.

I'll come back forward in the evening when it's cool, give it a chance to work its way out if it wants to.

I don't wanna be impatient, and then stir it up and have it fall in.

I waited then on my lunch break, I come out, and it's already at a point in the temperature where, if I don't just dart from shade covering to shade covering, I risk getting dizzy, falling and going unconscious and being eaten alive by everything that would like to feast on my corpse out here.

I have to very fast and very careful while I'm fast, not to trip and fall and get knocked out or stand up too fast, get light headed and fall and lose consciousness.

Because if I can't at least crawl to shade and I lose consciousness...that's why I can't drink too much alcohol.

I cannot lose consciousness out here unless I'm tucked away nicely and sleeping at night in a safe location, otherwise it'll be a death sentence.

So that's why I'm gonna call this shade, or die, like the old game skate or die.

But that lizard was also seeking shade. I have created a nice shade canopy over this garden, and it looked like it was possibly having the time of its life, just chilling in the shade, laying out on this tree pot where the moisture is wicking up on it. So it may have just been thinking, I found the oasis. I found paradise. So I don't wanna mess with it, because it did look like it might be just having the time of its life.

But later, at lunch break, I come out and I said, I can't risk that it could be suffering down there, and it could be distraught down there.

So I'm gonna risk myself a little bit, and I'm gonna risk getting scorched, moving around, crawling into where I need to get to and have that feeling of being punched in the face repeatedly by a pro boxer and getting hit by a train from all directions at the same time, continuously, nonstop, just any movement whatsoever, any time, in full exposure to the sun in the midday, it's quite a beating.

It's like running a mile and getting beat down and being in a car accident.

I think I've done all those things, maybe not on the same day or in the same second. That's what it feels like every time you're in the sun out here.

I've experienced all those things so that was a bit of beast mode that I had to muster to get in there and then the game was, how do I not again disturb it so that it just out of instinct, jumps into the water, and then we're really gonna have a problem.

So I got this thick glass blender picture that I used to get the pond water out to pour out onto the other potted plants.

I set that in position, and then I tried to nudge it so it would climb in and it kind of it moved fast which was good and showed me it was healthy but it made a sound.

I don't know much about lizards, I've seen a million of them out here already, but I never heard one make a sound. I just nudged it, I wasn't like a step on his toes, there was no agony or pain, but it was getting in a fighting stance, not knowing what or who I was, so certainly not necessarily understanding I'm there to help. But it made a vocalization, it was really a moment to behold. Just feeling that that raw, pure animal to animal, trying to get by, trying to live life, can't really put into words, but luckily, I was able to again safely for both of us, without it being aggressive, nudge it and get it to climb into the pitcher.

But I had to set it outside of the door and get myself out and hope that it stayed in there because if did try to wander off I'd want to make sure it found shade without being scorched by the hot ground.

I was able to get it to shade, it was a good outcome, and I didn't get injured, and I didn't fail or give up on it because of fear of the risk to myself.

I don't think of myself as like a hero, there have certainly been times where I wish I could have discovered trapped critters sooner and gotten them out of distressed situations.

But today was reminded that shade is life.

It's a miracle that we can survive within this narrow range of temperatures, and that the Earth just doesn't have mood swings, and the sun doesn't have mood swings and doesn't just kill everything off in one day or one night. It's pretty remarkable how we evolved to be this resilient and it's scary that we're pushing that upper limit right now.

I don't know what's worse to go through global warming or to live through an ice age. I have not myself lived in any climates further north than northern Washington so I don't know what it's like to be in real hardcore tundra, year round permafrost kind of environments.

I suppose I'll have to in order to complete my full biome tour of permaculture in my lifetime. For now, I don't think it gets much more extreme than what I'm doing.

I do have some interesting ideas that I'm working on, innovations because of my response to this, a few things that are forthcoming I wanna wait to mention.

But I will say that I discovered something today I wanna report on, which is a real, fascinating breakthrough that was unexpected, kind of a very serendipitous chain of events that led to a major breakthrough. A game changer in a big way, at least for me.

It's not gonna change the world. It's not a killer app for the world. Maybe it could be to some extent, but this little story, it's the electronic device, mobile phone version of this shade or die kind of motif, because within the last few days of really me knowing that around mid June is when the heat really comes back, and pretty much all of the deleterious effects of it are gonna be reoccurring around this time.

It will get worse in some ways, the concentration of it and the unrelenting cycles of it without any relief in the early mornings, where it does get cool enough for me to get my sanity back still at least a little bit, that's gonna go away pretty soon.

But all of the worst aspects of debilitation and just vehicle batteries losing their charge and dying having to do more maintenance on them.

Dehydration and electrolyte imbalances, and just feeling beaten up constantly and being agonized.

It's about how do you really adapt, like the wild animals do, shade, water... Today I was able to generate magically, this sort of effect of cooling without a huge amount of energy, nor elaborate chemical or mechanical machinery, there's this magical relationship that you can work with, like an alchemist, between airflow and water and to some extent, gravity, that gets into all kinds of thermo siphoning...

I'm working at different skills with all that kind of stuff, though on a tight budget now, so there's certain projects that are kind of partially developed because of budgetary issues.

I did plan for the worst, if the financial markets went bad, then I would rely on the most minimalistic systems of cooling, using airflow and water, in order to survive the three months of summer, and then after that, nine months of just total easy street...

That's how it's been, and it's been great.

So I feel like I have to endure this to earn how great, how livable and peaceful, and tolerable the climate is, how forgiving it is for those nine other months, and how much you appreciate even the coldest times and coldest months having lived through the summer.

The thing that's new about today is another air conditioning hack.

I've used just torn sheets and I dunk them in soapy water so that they don't get funky and they get routinely washed several times a day as they get re-moistened.

I'll wrap a sheet cloth dampened scarf around my neck and a sheet cloth bandana around my head, then monitor them for how moist they remain and dunk them again and again throughout the day. That keeps me relatively not super fussy and not losing my mind.

I have a number of fans of different sizes, but I've discovered that above about 85 degrees Fahrenheit, all you're doing is basically making yourself more fussy and uncomfortable by blasting hot air in your face.

It certainly has a temporary cooling effect if there is any water on your body or on your clothing. That's the combination of the cooling effect that occurs when moving air comes in contact with moisture.

Damp clothing has the most powerful, most simplistic effect that if you can afford the water, which I have more water this year than I had in the previous two years, so I can do more experimentation and be more liberal about it...

But I'm trying to still live right the edge of tolerability because I could just put on clothes from head to toe, blast fans and just keep myself completely soaked from head to toe all day while there's enough sun to keep those fans blasting.

I'll be super comfortable at that point. But the water supply would get used up so fast that I would rather figure out what is the minimum surface area of the skin to keep covered with moist cloth.

Also it makes sense to work with less energy use of the solar energy air flow of the fans within a certain range because at a certain point, if you use too much fan power, you dry out the water faster.

The cooling effect happens because the fan is blowing the air on it, but the fan blowing air out is also evaporating and creating the cooling effect. So therefore you're burning off that water, you're evaporating it off.

So the water input is excessive and much of it is lost.

Whenever it feels like I'm literally on fire I will use a hand spray bottle to just coat my full body. But then, of course, it's dry again within seconds. But at least it can be very effective momentarily.

Those are things I've talked about before, I just wanted to mention them again because this kind of builds on that and builds on this logic of having the means to operate at a more energy and resource consumptive scale, but trying to strike a balance between the psychological tolerability of suffering and torture and minimal use of the energy and resources in the spirit of conservation, and in the sense that anything could happen, where I may need to stretch those supplies further. So better to be as frugal as possible, as just a way of life.

What I stumbled upon literally today? Well, not literally stumbling, but in the sense that it just kind of happened unintentionally, was that one of my kind of metal, very thin, stainless steel metal bowls, you probably would think of as a dog food bowl. Nothing wrong with eating out of it, which I normally do.

But I've been using one of the bowls for dunking the scarf and the bandana.

As I said before, all of the extreme effects are returning now, there's really nothing else left that hasn't already happened. One of those things is the extreme overheating of my mobile device during a lot of the day, to a point where important calls can get cut off.

If I have to go in and just do anything, a quick email or reset something, or start any little task, it could just get stuck there and then just be cooking.

I finally thought, is it realistic for me to imagine somehow attaching a fan, like a computer CPU fan or a computer power cooling fan to the phone.

I bought a couple of those, one of them is already attached on the outside of a computer to just add more cooling and that's doing fine. There has not been any slowing down or any performance hit whatsoever.

So the fanning is working fine, but the phone, when the temperature is at or above 105F, it starts to really, really suffer.

I think it's unwise to push that and it's certainly very demoralizing and very scary because I don't wanna damage the phone, that would be a major setback.

So I dug one out this morning wired it up to the solar power system with a nice detachable in-line coupler so I could plug it in when it gets hot and unplug it when it's when it's cooler, so I don't just waste and run down batteries when I don't need to use it. Before I even had a chance to think about how I might attach it to the phone, I use a protective case for the phone, and what ended up working out was just dropping that fan...just kind of looking around having a Curious George moment of curiosity...

I said to myself, that fan looks like it would fit perfectly in that little dog bowl and just be suspended by its edges pretty much halfway up inside that dog bowl, so that I could put a small amount of water beneath it as an experiment.

I was excited to experiment with right combination of a dance between the location of a water feature at any scale and the location of either ambient airflow and wind, for my purposes, the solar powered micro fan type system.

I've had trouble before trying to figure out how to get this to do something useful at the right angle, at the right distance, right amount of water, the right amount of fan power.

What I had been doing last year was basically wasting a lot of water by taking, larger fan, hanging it off of the wall, pointing it at myself, laying down, and then hanging up one of these pieces of sheet material and just blasting it with a spritzer bottle every few minutes.

That would generate a wave of cool air coming at me where I wasn't dampening myself, but I the hot air was meeting the moisture on the fabric and rapidly drying out the fabric. But in that process of that exchange of those molecules, the whole area that I was in would be cooler, and I would just do that repeatedly.

It was effective, and water conserving, yet somewhat demoralizing.

That was at the peak of last year's summer, it was barely enough for me to not be in a state of total psychological meltdown during the hottest points of the day.

But I wasn't generating the feeling of holding an ice cube by doing that, it was just mildly slightly cooler air. At that temperature, it doesn't take much to perceive it as cooler.

But it's not like putting your head in a freezer for a minute at the beer store, when you're getting your beer or at home or whatever, like we've all done before.

But interestingly, I was able to magically, miraculously, actually find a perfect balance of these elements to where I was able to generate coldness.

It wasn't generating frost and wasn't generating ice. But it was much colder than just a relative coolness compared to hotter objects or the air. It actually was very much the temperature of what it would feel like to hold an ice cube.

That was the base of that metal bowl where the water in it was being gently made to spin. On the surface there was a little bit of turbulence.

The fan was obviously sucking the air between the water and the fan up and through the fan. So the fan was kind of kicking up, not so much a cool water, in fact, the air that was coming out of that little five inch by five inch computer fan, that was not very comfortable I wouldn't put my face over that and think I was getting a lot of a cooling effect.

Where the cooling occurred was at the base of the bowl, and it was insane to me.

I couldn't believe it. I can't believe this is happening, it wasn't cooling my entire blood supply instantaneously but I figured wow if I have another one I could at least double this and then there are Ways where I now can conceive of getting more of these and scaling it up.

Paul Wheaton, the master of cold climate, rocket mass heating technologies, his mantra is heat the person, not the room. If you wanna be efficient with fuel and design. He would use small heaters to heat his hands and feet, his hands for the keyboard to do work in the cold, and his feet, I believe. But then just be bundled up. You don't have to heat all of the air in the whole room. That's not really necessary. You can stay bundled up and just apply the heat where your skin is exposed.

That made a lot of sense to me and I live by that in different ways.

So in this sense, I don't need to cool the whole room if I can cool my blood and even to some extent, just have a greater perception of relative coolness, for the sanity preservation effect of the perception of relative coolness.

That was a breakthrough for me, because I know there's obviously different refrigerant gas technologies at different scales, motorized, much louder than that fan was.

I would love to go to a junkyard and pull out all of the mini fridge air compressors and see if I could set up a system that isn't super loud with the motors and get that dialed in.

But this is even more elegant than that, to just set this computer fan snugly safely above the water line, well above the water line of just a half cup of water, whatever it was, and then end up basically with an eternal ice cube.

But this maybe three inch diameter surface where the coolness is concentrated at the base, it was a gradient up along the sides of the bowl.

If under these conditions with just a computer fan and a half a cup of water in that dog bowl to have that create an eternal ice cube with a three inch diameter surface area, now I say to myself, cool the person...

I played with it. I stuck the bowl in my armpits, on my forehead, it was nice but not effective at cooling the blood. The original purpose was to cool the phone not to cool me. I had to know whether it was gonna be capable of preventing the phone from becoming incapacitated during the heat of the day.

It would be a breech of survivalist protocol to not maintain a functioning communication device. If I can't signal distress with this phone my other options are far less ideal.

In addition to making sure that it doesn't just malfunction because of the heat, the other factor is that when the heat gets near and above 105 degrees Fahrenheit, you can have it plugged in and it will sustain its functioning at the current charge level that it's at, but it will not charge up. The charge percentage will not be added to until later in the day, after the sun goes down. Only then will it go from wherever it was when it stopped charging.

I don't always have great control over that. If I did have to open it and use it for something, the life of the battery could get sucked out very fast, fast enough to where you end up between 20 and 50%, and then it gets stuck there and you can't increase it.

That means that if you had to unplug it because you had to respond to any kind of emergency situation, then you would be breaking that survival rule of filling up your gas tank at the halfway point.

So you should never go below that if you need to respond to an emergency.

So the same logic would apply. I would like to keep the phone at 90 to a hundred percent most of the time.

Interestingly, there are people who say there are countries that do kind of social credit score type surveillance, where they will know how responsible of a person you are based on the metrics of your batteries, charging cycles, they can extract that from your phone. Then they say we're not gonna hire you because we know that you don't keep your phone charged very well. That means we can't trust you to be responsible with anything.

I'm not a fan of that kind of surveillance capitalism, but if you apply that logic of what it means to be a responsible survivalist, a responsible person, let alone responsible survivalist, who claims to be on top of this kind of stuff...

For me, having a phone that is barely functional for the tiniest, quickest task, and then is completely rendered malfunctional, if not completely bricked as hackers would say, after using it for a few minutes...

Even worse than that, it's not charging, and you risk it just shutting down and not being able to be charged, even if you plug it in for the whole day until the temperature goes back down to at least to 90F. It's happened to me before, luckily I didn't die because of it.

I have to always be thinking of the worst case scenario, not in every second of my life, but if something like that, a red flag like that comes up, how compromising would that be if I really needed to rely on it?

So anytime something comes up, where it's like if that was a situation where you needed that jump box to not be at low power, so that you can't jump yourself and leave...

Those things force me to change a strategy of battery power maintenance.

So the experiment today was deprive myself of the cooling experience of my new little pseudo ice machine.

I lay the phone face down, place the bowl on top of the back of the phone, I wait for a little while to get confirmation that the battery charges and when I pick up the back of the phone is as cold as as beer from a refrigerator.

So I was thrilled that it was, that it was possible to use this magical Macgyver, alchemy of airflow and water and metal to concentrate the cooling effect.

Even with the tiniest fan, I was able to put my phone in the refrigerator so I could charge it in a 115F degree heat, ambient around the phone.

It charged up to a hundred percent and remained a hundred percent all day.

The few times that I did pick it up to do minor things, it was snappy, it was quick, it was not bogged down. It was functioning perfectly. I could get away with doing a few things, obviously, not trying to stream movies for 10 hours…

What a tiny amount of water in that bowl did, by some miracle that somebody can explain to me someday, generated that level of coolness, and that is a total game changer.

What if this mission actually mattered to anybody other than me? What if someone needed my help? What if it wasn't just me tempting fate on my own in the middle of nowhere?

Now I know that I don't ever have to worry about missing that call because I let that phone get cooked into oblivion.

It's powerful that we have these tools and we can be connected.

Certainly, let's do it wisely, do for the right reasons, be helpful and not harmful to people with this power that we have to be connected.

I just can't tell you how I feel now, knowing that, because it means I've established a microcosm of something that I can scale up in size or I can scale this down in size or I can scale it sideways meaning just more of the same pattern.

But it makes me think about, knowing what I know now, and having the experience that I have doing the R and D, that if you can put preferably cool water dampened cloth in the crotch and the armpits around the neck and around the head, you can be comfortable. You can survive and come back from the edge of heat stroke and heat exhaustion, all various degrees of heat illness, and you could survive.

I'm very keenly aware of the need for thinking this stuff through, because I do a lot of research on the history of war and the kind of marching orders that are given...circumstances like the Korean War, winter deaths in the freezing cold, and the marching orders given during the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

They were wearing absurd costumes, they would just drop dead like flies because they were given marching marching orders in the hotter months with just no clue about the limits of human performance under those conditions.

I know for myself. I'm a one chain link, chain of command it's just me, I'm my own commander and I'm not gonna command myself to go on a mission that's going to be certain death, because accomplishing the mission is gonna require that I survive.

So I said it before, I'll say it again now, I'm the mission.

I'm not here to join an organization that's gonna have me go out and get blown to bits.

I'm going to take a step back from taking orders on those front lines and I'm gonna see if we can design peace. 99 hours of design to every 1 hour of work versus 99 hours work to every 1 hour of design.

That's how I feel about combat and warfare. Because on this chess board I was born upon, I hacked my way and social engineered my way towards the back of that chess board.

It was a foregone conclusion that I was on a path to become a soldier earlier in life and then things changed and I ended up becoming more of a solo, covert operator of my own chain of command.

I took that mindset that I inherited, or was born with, or that I gleaned from all of my mentors, from the ex-military in my life, and I opted not to join that fighting force, and I joined different fighting forces.

What we lacked in boom and bang, we made up for in a lot of other areas of character development and of tactical and strategic development.

I've talked about all that stuff at length before. It's nothing threatening or intimidating. It's designing peace and applying strength and power and force into peace work.

Like the ninjas have said. War is easy. Peace is hard.

So don't be a warrior and go into combat because it's cool.

It's hard to design peace, keep peace, maintain peace, preserve it, value it, and if necessary, engage in war to destroy those who threaten the peace at whatever scale.

How this relates to the topic of shade or die is, don't tell me to go out and march in your funny suit in the middle of the hot season so that you can impress some politician, so you can impress your higher up, and I become a sacrifice to that.

It could just be done in a more intelligent manner, and certainly not all commanding officers or generals or that foolish, otherwise there would be no nations, we'd all just be dead.

So somebody has to figure out something. But hey, they do it at the expense of expending hundreds of thousands, millions of young usually men's lives, so that they can find out, oh, maybe we shouldn't wear these giant, absurd costumes that we're barely appropriate in a totally different climate.

Maybe we should become more climate aware as warriors.

But for me, I'm here thinking if in my life and my tactics and strategies for my missions, for my campaigns, that I'm the commander of...

Survival to complete the mission matters because I'm not expendable. So I have to figure this out.

Today I figured out something that on any battlefield of any political nature or personal nature, the battlefield that is surviving climate crisis, where the enemy is the sun...sad to say, as much as I love it, as much as I worship it, it is the thing most likely to kill me right now.

It is the thing most likely to disrupt my communications so that I would die unnecessarily without them, which is a tactic enemies use.

Clip your phone wires, back in the day, that was what the Green Berets would go do.

Dirty Deeds done dirt cheap behind enemy lines...

The manuals are free to download online, pretty much everything that's been declassified.

So with minimal amounts of water and a tiny fan and a little bit of solar energy and battery power, you could reverse the overheating of a GPS unit, or a satellite phone, or an emergency rescue beacon. Anything that is overheating an malfunctioning.

While the base of the metal bowl is the coolest area, the water in the bowl is also much cooler, so I can cool my blood more effectively by wrapping the damp cloths as I had been, though now, as a side effect of the mechanism that was devised to keep my phone alive, I'm able to force multiply the cooling effects and apply them to my blood as it passes through large vessels near the skin surface.

It's a moment to behold, really worth celebrating.