Free Living With the Dead: The Hungry Land by Joshua Guess

practical things they will need to know in order to make the best and most efficient use of what they have. What woods will resist rot and decay, to better build housing and defenses. Ignition temperatures of those same woods. Usefulness of their sap, historical applications of the material, optimal growing conditions, harvesting methods...the list for any given thing goes on and on. You get the idea.

I've also talked about how a lot of the kids are starting to rotate around to learn different skills from different people. Aaron has been working like mad to take that idea to full-scale implementation, so that every child has a full day of honing real skills and not just memorizing rote data. At first he focused on farming, weaving, that sort of thing. Subjects were added as they were thought up, so now there are five major areas where kids practice skills and crafts. Farming, Materials (making fabric, working leather, weaving chainmail, making weapons, etc), Survival skills (cooking, herbalism, wilderness survival, basic medicine, defensive tactics, combat training, etc), General Knowledge (which includes math, history, geology, communication, important facts like the above mentioned tree and related important things, and how to utilize general knowledge. Confused? That's okay. It takes some explaining...), and Critical thinking.

The last one is my favorite. The other four areas give the kids a huge education in pretty much every area they will need to become better survivors. The last trains their minds to work in different and more powerful ways to build the mental strength, creativity, and reactions needed to properly use what they know. Aaron has instructed all of the folks teaching the kids to create problems and situations that will tax their minds, make them come up with many solutions. Aaron himself is now doing things to throw the kids out of their comfort zone, like throwing in sudden questions about, say, the effective firing range of a given type of bow while in the middle of teaching a class about making pottery. He's trying to get their minds used to coming up with answers on the fly, and he say he will eventually make the system more complex.

Can you imagine what it will be like for them after months or years of this? Every day their minds will be stretched a little further, made a little stronger. Before they realize it, they will be analyzing every problem without thought, weighing solutions instantly. Better yet, at some point they'll begin looking at everything around them and catching potential problems before they happen, and improving things. It's a dizzying thought.

Of course, I'm a realist. I know that for the immediate future, the kids are likely to be grumbling and unhappy about this. It's going to be hard for them, but it's a necessary step. We're trying to do everything we can to give them tools to survive and improve.

Hmm. Just got another one of those damn phone calls. It's bad enough that we have to deal with the hordes of the undead, but I really thought annoying phone calls were a thing of the past. So much for the apocalypse.

I've tried calling the number back, but it never works. This is driving me nuts.
     
    Thursday, March 24, 2011
    An End
    Posted by Josh Guess
     
    I've always believed that every person should have the right to end their own life if they choose. It isn't something that comes up a lot nowadays. I think that's due to the fact that the zombie plague burned away the people most prone to killing themselves, leaving only those with the strongest survival instinct.

There are some pains, however, that are too much for any person to bear.

This morning one of our guards didn't show up for his shift. It was the guy who was manning the heavy gun the other day, when the group of starving people were killed at our gate. When his room was searched, his body was found.

I'm deliberately not mentioning his name here, because it isn't important. His actions were his to take right