Peter "Sci" Turpin

Above is a picture I drew a few years back to illustrate the concept of “Kit Lines” (*); the conceptual layers of equipment a prepared person might arrange for themselves (**).

Over time, I’ve come to realise that kit/equipment is just a facet of a wider range of things this conceptually covers. Calling them kit-lines reinforces the image of it being about what tools you can equip yourself with. What it is actually about is what resources are available to you, categorised by their inherent seperation from you. They are resource-lines, the concept of the supply and support line combined and re-compartmentalised.

Reinterpretting the original definitons for this idea, you get:

Line 1; “Worn” – Those resources which you have with you at all times. Your clothing, accessories.

Line 2; “Carried” – Those items you might pick up if leaving the house briefly. Keyring, wallet, mobile phone.. anything you might have ready access to.

Line 3; “Packed” – Packed gets into the resources requiring an extra layer of storage, a bag of some sort, for you to take it with you. Most survival-kits, camping gear, anything in your vehicle.

Line 4; “Embedded” – Items that require a non-trivial amount of effort to relocate. Difficult to take them with you. Your furniture, PC, bed, most household possesions, workshop contents, food garden, etc.

Line 5; “Residential” – Your home itself, the roads and services that supply your area. These items are essentially imobile. You have to be in the same place as them to access them. Can also include friends and aquaintences, as they’re also location-specific, even if only in conceptual communication-spaces.

Line 6; “Communal” – Essentially omnipresent resources, available in almost all locations. Bit harder to define, but could include the Internet, generic medicines, air, the economy, national government, public transport systems and so on.

These lines act not as a list of essentials, but a way to conceptualise the resources available to you as well as their possible vulnerabilities. You may have a lot of resources at Line 4, but if you loose line 5 you may loose it all with it.

Again, there are dependancies between the various lines, not all of them standard. 5 may effect 4, but 3 may not effect 2. It all depends on the specifics of your own resource arrangements. Loss of medicines on Line 6 might not cause a big problem for some, but loss of national government might take out Line 5 entirely.

It’s a convenient mental tool for visualising your personal resilience. YMMV.

The unstated item in this list though is the conceptual “Resource Line Zero”. That is YOU. You exist at the center of the diagram, and even when all the other layers of resources are peeled away, there’s still you. Line Zero is your inherent skills, your health and fittness, etc. Line Zero is what you would have if dumped naked on a desert island. All others are external constructions.

(*) The “Kit” concept was originally put to me through Sean Kennedy’s work on Rant Radio, and had a rather survivalist bent. It also reinforced many peoples bad habit of buying equipment and being reassured by having it, rather than learning how to use it. It became another game of bigger and better ownership.

(**) The website I drew it for was Empowerthyself.com, which while still up is essentially lifeless. It was a good concept, but killed by over-engineering. There was simply too great a bulk of website created for a small userbase to maintain, and as a result the users there felt inaffective and dwindled away. A handful of people stumbling around inside a gargantuan mansion, unable to find anything.

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So I’ve been trying to find an affordable video editor to avoid the mutlitude of format-incompatibilities with the various freeware I’ve tried so far. A few days ago I installed “VideoPad” which until the 15th of Jan is on 30% discount making it about £45.

Of course that’s £45 I shouldn’t be spending, but.. well some quick and dirty edits seem to show it working fine merging videos of different resolutions and framerates. Okay framerate conversion is rather rough looking, but whatever it’s doing it’s FAR more tollerant than the other programs I tried (remember the one that wouldn’t combine clips because one was 30fps and the other was 30.00003fps? Or had the codec info case-sensitive so it thought they were different formats?).

The built-in capture util sadly wouldn’t let me change the video card input port. But NCH bundle their software to link-out to associated software. I clicked the link within VideoPad for “Golden Videos” a small capture program intended for capturing from tapes. But best of all it actually fucking works with my RealTek soundcard AND captures without dropping frames at full PAL resolution.

I have litterally been in tears of joy, because since I switched to Windows XP I have tried everything I could think of to get full-frame full-rate capture working. The best I’d been able to manage was installing an old copy of WinDVR to capture to mpeg2 and to disable onboard sound, instead throwing in an old (noisey) PCI Soundblaster card. And that had even odds of bluescreening the machine every time you started the program.

More than 6 years trying to fix one issue and a solution just dropped in my lap.

Okay this program’s ripping to Xvid rather than uncompressed, but it looks better than mpeg.

I’ve ripped a few old tapes to the PC now. Some are very good looking, others not so much. The Furry-artist interviews I did at that convention in the USA have suffered quite badly, as the camera did not travel well and started conking out at points due to temp/humidity, as well as being set to LP for a large portion. The audio, with a few FZZZTs asside, is actually very good though. It’s given me the idea to chop the unwatchable portions of video and fill them with sketch-animatics of the artists and other reference images. It could actually work quite well in the end.

Mostly I’m glad I found the impromtu interview with Ashryn. I thought it was the last thing I recorded there and since it wasn’t after the last “proper” interview on the last tape, I assumed I must have done the whole interview without pressing record somehow. But no, just got the order mixed up in my mind and it’s still there.

I should be able to do something good with this, even if it is 6 years later than I’d intended.

Also found video of my grandfather showing how to make his famous apple tarts, and some footage of one of his birthday parties. Is bittersweet to watch.

And ancient footage, even a short bit of the folk I worked for down in Hastings when I first got a video camera (not the huge one I got later), followed by the big Exeter Therians meet back in 2001.

Lot of lost history on these tapes. Just like the lost chat-logs and photos I’ve saved from the old tiny HDs.

So many things that were lost and gone are suddenly found.

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There’s an old adage that “there’s no money in a cure” when talking about pharmaceutical companies. It’s wrong though, from a single angle. There is money in a cure; when the treatment is the main product of your competitor.

Was also thinking about Scientology.
There’s a disconnect in understanding them I think. While we joke about Xenu and so forth, we’re not thinking about it from their perspective. If they’re so far into the “church” that they know that big ultimate truth, then they’ve been conditioned to KNOW that learning of these things without conditioning will KILL YOU.
I can only conclude then that either those who’re exposed to the protesters shouting about Xenu & the whole alien-souls backstory are either never going to be allowed so high in the organisation to be told of its alleged importance or are so high in the org that they know it’s bullshit (unlikely, as there would need to be thousands that high in base-level jobs for those to be the only type exposed). I conclude this because if the ones being shouted at knew what their cults own stance on that knowledge was, the fact these unconditioned protesters were not dropping dead from the knowledge would expose a fundamental chink in the armour.
Of course I rather suspect that there’s a third or fourth option, possibly in the form some sort defined of natural enemy of Scientology who I’m unaware of who can be exposed to the info & live with the express purpose of harming the cult, or that the definition of the information destroying/killing you is in a more metaphorical or spiritual sense.

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