For many weeks after I would look up at every plane passing over to see if it was dropping something.
"Look mummy, there's an aeroplane up in the sky
Ooh Did you see the frightened ones? Did you hear the falling bombs? Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?"
Basically any contribution to a repository which got archived gets you the nod. Likewise for the Mars rover one.
> @alexjplant contributed code to 0 repositories in the 2020 GitHub Archive Program.
Maybe it was in a since-deleted repository?
Maybe try messaging github support to ask?
You'd be better off reading a book on hydroponics and subsistence farming if you were determined to see it through. And have a way to exit stage left available in case it all doesn't work out.
Left to our own devices we form tight knit, small scale communities which are very protective of each other but extremely hostile to anything else. There's no "society", no "technology", no "time to build something". Look at the Primitive Technology guy on youtube; Even very basic metal is impossible without industry, so no metal ax, no metal parts for anything. Stone tools are incredibly inferior to even basic modern tools.
The spare people and time required to develop and work an industry to start building ANYTHING more than a weaved basket or stone ax requires the recreation of agriculture, except nearly none of the survivors of any situation will understand anything about growing plants, and we don't have a hundred thousand years of human history practicing while being nomadic hunters.
Your gun won't protect you. Your stores of food will run out. Your knowledge of anything that isn't "how do I sustainably produce one million calories a year with only my bare hands" is useless.
I had read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, really the prototype of this kind of thing, about a limited nuclear event and what would happen. There's a great bit:
On the ninth day after The Day, Lavinia McGovern died. This, too, had been inevitable ever since the lights went out and the refrigeration ceased. Since Lavinia McGovern suffered from diabetes, insulin had kept her alive. Without refrigeration, insulin deteriorated rapidly. Not only Lavinia, but all diabetics in Fort Repose, dependent on insulin, died at about the same period as the drug lost its potency.
Now, insulin is much more shelf-stable, but you get the idea. I was struck. So imagine a tween who had drawn up lists of "who had what," where we were going to meet, and general plans for your limited nuclear war. I did have the relatively bright idea of trekking to this particularly cold and hidden spring as a kind of natural refrigerator for wrapped food and batteries and the like. All of that eventually faded after the Berlin Wall came down.
I still think about it, from time to time, as "What would I be good for besides slave labor?" They made us get pretty handy with electronics for my degree and the rest of my sciences were well-rounded with chemistry and some very basic civil engineering. I ran amok in TechShop before they folded, so the shop stuff I can get by with to some degree.
In terms of computing's value, I think the two biggest areas of overlooked utility would be packet radio for a low-bandwidth internet, and having the foresight to have offline copies of Wikipedia, scans of the Gingery books, and so forth, connected up to a PC with line conditioned solar power. With dozens of the same PC or laptop, because those parts wear out. Otherwise, yes, IT probably won't be a big part of your average scavenger horde hellbent on reenacting parts of The Road Warrior.
Then the year later at a new school there was the Chernobyl disaster.
I can understand why there was such a reduced want in nuclear energy, 40 years later though I wonder how things would be if we'd gotten rid of coal and gas sooner?!
'86 is the first year I properly remember. Challenger went boom while we were doing a big space project at school, Chernobyl went pop just as I was starting to pay some attention to world news, and Optimus Prime was offed on-screen. More than enough to sear the year into the memory of a young lad!
We aren't in that different a universe from the Cold War, unless someone's dismantled the thousands of nuclear weapons we point at eachother, and hasn't told me.
The worst thing about the Cold War ending is how everyone talks like the world has changed, yet it really hasn't.
For reference, the big cultural fear when I was young was terrorism and rogue states, and then around adulthood it was ISIS and the like. These things still exist, but the cultural focus here has shifted for a while.
It's no longer the decade of long-distance bombers delivering warheads directly to where they intend to bomb. It'll just be a series of bright re-entry streaks from an ICBM releasing it's cluster of warheads on your metro area.
I was very depressed one weekend and decided to watch threads, when the wind blows and the graveyard of the fireflies back to back. How I didn’t off myself after that unbelievably bleak triple bill I’ll never know.
The film ends with a timeskip over a decade later, with the populace reduced to pre-industrial life struggling to survive as they farm off the irradiated land, and those who've grown up in that world speak a very damaged version of English (as if it was hard for everyone to understand Yorkshire accents in the first place!). There's attempts to keep people educated from what they can remember and scavenge, but it doesn't hold a candle to what was once.
It's a very mortifying film that hits you hard, and even skimming over bits of it as I type this, the shot of the mushroom cloud behind Sheffield city centre has made my gut sink – and this is from someone who was born after the Cold War, God knows how distressing it was for those who watched it during the height of it.