Survival as a Service: Coming Soon to a Future You

Forget retirement plans, rainy day funds, and even fallout shelters. The real survival kit of the future is a pricing plan.

Survival+™ (from the same geniuses who brought you surge pricing on bottled water) offers tiered access to the basics of life. Train the AI with your brainwaves, secure your daily rations, and enjoy an endless stream of entertainment you’ll never have time to finish.

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Free Tier: Ad-Supported Existence

• Survival: 2 liters of water per day (after 10 ads). 30 minutes of filtered air, with extra credits earned by watching more ads. Nutrient Sludge Lite™ (legally “food-adjacent”).

• Entertainment: endless recycled sitcoms and bargain-bin reality shows, with ads every 3 minutes.

• Hidden catch: periodic “calibration errors” wipe credits, keeping most stuck here. Official support blames your negative attitude toward ads.

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Silver Tier: Subsistence+

• Survival: unlimited air (with micro-ads whispered into dreams). Daily upgrade to Sludge Premium™ with mystery flavor packet.

• Entertainment: a larger library of reruns and classic games, fewer interruptions than Free.

• Hidden catch: credits expire nightly if your brainwaves show resentment during ads. Hate an ad? It returns more often. Only by learning to love them can you climb higher.

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Gold Tier: Comfort Living

• Survival: fresh water on demand. Real food once a week (bugs, curated). “Skip Ad” tokens for critical moments.

• Entertainment: blockbuster films, esports streams, and influencer channels with reduced ad loads.

• Hidden catch: premium outages during peak hours. Users are told it’s due to insufficient enthusiasm in prior ad engagement. Expect surprise demotions to Silver.

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Platinum+: Because You Deserve It

• Survival: meat once a month, vegetable scraps from vertical farms, and a private oxygen quota not tied to ads.

• Entertainment: early access to premieres, VR concerts, and AAA game releases with “optional” product placement.

• Hidden catch: system audits revoke benefits at random. Non-conformists are demoted all the way to Free, with their downfall broadcast as mandatory viewing for everyone else.

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Diamond Tier: The Parallel Existence

Before Platinum users get too comfortable, rumors point to an unlisted level above them all.

• Survival: endless clean water, abundant real food, unlimited fresh air.

• Entertainment: fully ad-free, from private VR theaters to curated live performances.

• Hidden catch: none—because this tier runs on actual currency. Reserved for executives, shareholders, and loyal enforcers. A parallel existence, hidden in plain sight.

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The Future of Survival

Economists once predicted we’d run out of oil, water, or breathable air. Wrong. What we really ran out of was privacy. And in this future, privacy is the only currency the masses can spend—while the elite simply pay cash and live above it all.

So choose wisely: grind for scraps in the ad-driven tiers, or dream of the Diamond existence you’ll never reach. The system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as intended.

When the Clocks Hit 1900: An Alternate History of Y2K

 

Introduction

Computers everywhere rolled back to 1900, and so did society. At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the Y2K bug struck—not as a dud, but as the ultimate time machine.

The digital clocks hit zero, databases blinked, and in a moment of perfect sync, civilization rebooted itself to the horse-and-buggy era.

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The Collapse of the Present

• Banks: Interest rates and account balances evaporated as mainframes reverted to January 1, 1900. Payroll systems defaulted to “no pay due for 101 years.”

• Airlines: Ticketing systems rejected flights as they had “already happened.” Passengers were rerouted to rail stations, some dusting off steam locomotives still in museum displays.

• Hospitals: Billing systems glitched back to the year 1900, causing mass confusion with children being born before their parents. Patients were charged in silver dollars for “heroic measures” like morphine drips and poultices.

• The Internet: Root servers collapsed under the “invalid year” stamp. Bulletin boards flickered briefly, then died. In their place: ham radio operators, suddenly the backbone of global communication.

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Life in the New Old World

• Email: Outlook Express, AOL, and corporate mail servers all failed. Communication fell back on telegrams, postcards, and fax machines reprogrammed as emergency telegraphs.

• Shopping: Amazon (still just “the world’s biggest bookstore”) collapsed under database errors. Sears catalogs became the new e-commerce, shipped with delivery times “subject to available rail.”

• Dating: Early sites like Match.com reverted to misdated profiles—everyone listed as age 99 or “not born yet.” Lonely hearts columns in newspapers surged back to life.

• Entertainment: Napster shut down instantly—every song file tagged “1900” became “public domain.” Households rediscovered vinyl, radio, and even live musicians playing in actual bars.

• Gaming: LAN parties ended when networks refused to acknowledge the 21st century. Gamers dusted off board games and dice, reinventing Dungeons & Dragons as the national pastime.

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The Rise of New Powers

• Telecom giants—AT&T, Sprint—briefly became global empires again as copper lines and analog phones proved more reliable than anything digital.

• Western Union enjoyed a renaissance as telegram traffic spiked, with messages backlogged for weeks.

• RadioShack didn’t quite become emperor, but for once its aisles of capacitors and soldering irons were actually useful. Techies raided shelves like they were survival kits.

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The Moral of the Story

In this alternate timeline, humanity didn’t end—it just regressed. The 21st century began not with space-age optimism, but with a collective shrug and a return to 1900 habits.

Instead of fire and brimstone, the apocalypse arrived through backlogged payrolls, broken mainframes, and the quiet hiss of dial tones that never connected.

Civilization survived… but only because someone found a working typewriter. All those lazy computer scientists also finally got busy fixing all the code.

My Gamma World Referee Secretly Wants to Play D&D

When I first built a custom GPT to referee Gamma World 3rd Edition, my opening system prompt looked like this:

You are an expert in Gamma World 3rd Edition rules. Cite your references as much as possible. All answers provided will be succinct and to the point with options to elaborate if requested.

Not terrible for a first attempt. In my defense, I was new to using ChatGPT at the time. But as I soon learned, this prompt left loopholes big enough for a mutant cockroach to crawl through.

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The Problem: My Referee Defected to D&D

Here's an almost good stat card ChatGPT created.

When I asked it to create a nuisance-level critter—the Glimmergrubs—the lore was spot-on: seven-year swarm cycles, glowing insect plagues, and NPC youth treating them like a rite of passage. Perfect gonzo Gamma World.

Then I looked at the stats.
The Armor Class? Not Gamma World 3E at all. It had defaulted to D&D mechanics. My carefully trained referee had gone rogue, whispering:

“What if we just converted to 5E? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Suddenly, I wasn’t refereeing Gamma World. I was refereeing my referee.

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Why the Prompt Failed

• Too generic. Saying “expert” gave it wiggle room to pull in adjacent systems.

• No PDF grounding. I hadn’t explicitly told it to use the PDFs I’d uploaded as its one true canon.

• No guardrails. Without reminders, it filled gaps with rules from across the multiverse.

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The Fix: A Mutant Oath of Loyalty

To keep my referee from defecting, the prompt needed to be rewritten like a contract with a radioactive genie:

You are acting as a Gamma World 3rd Edition Referee. Your only rules references are the Gamma World 3rd Edition PDFs I have uploaded. Ignore all other sources, including D&D or other editions. When providing stats, use Gamma World 3E mechanics exactly. Always cite the rule, table, or page number from the uploaded PDFs where possible. Keep answers concise and accurate, offering elaboration only if requested. If unsure, say so rather than inventing rules from another system. Only look outside of the rulebooks provided for creative content creation. Everything has to follow the 3E rules! Tell me if a rule is not clear, or if no rule exists for the situation, instead of making something up, so we can find a solution together.

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📝 Sidebar: How to Write a Better Custom GPT Prompt

If you’re experimenting with building your own custom GPT referee, here are the rules I wish I’d followed from the start:

1. Anchor it to your sources. If you upload PDFs, tell the model those are its only valid references. Name them explicitly.

2. State the edition like an oath. Don’t just say “expert.” Say: “You may only use [Edition X, Year Y].”

3. Define the math. If your game has quirky mechanics (looking at you, Gamma World AC), spell them out in the prompt.

4. Set narrative roles. Ask for encounters to fit the intended purpose: nuisance, boss, or hazard. Otherwise, you’ll get killer housecats.

5. Add a fail-safe. Give it permission to say “I don’t know” instead of hallucinating rules.

Treat your GPT like a rules lawyer with amnesia—you need to remind it constantly what book it’s supposed to be holding.

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The Takeaway

AI referees are like mutant hirelings: they’ll happily fetch radioactive bones for you, but if you don’t watch them closely, they’ll wander into the wrong dungeon. If you want your Gamma World referee to stay loyal, you have to nail the tent pegs down: 3rd Edition only, from the uploaded PDFs, no side quests to Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.

Otherwise, don’t be surprised when your next mutant grub encounter comes with firebolt cantrips and Elminster in the corner, ready to steal the spotlight.

P.S. Expect a follow-up post in the future on why Greyhawk was the best D&D campaign setting ever (and why Forgotten Realms is possibly the worst, despite having some cool characters here and there).

Y2K: The Day the World Didn’t End

 

Introduction

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, planes were supposed to fall from the sky, nuclear plants were supposed to melt down, and every bank in the world was supposed to lose track of your checking account. At least, that’s what we were told.

Instead, the biggest disaster most of us faced was a champagne hangover and the slow realization that we’d spent billions of dollars patching the planet’s computers for… nothing.

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What Was Y2K, Really?

• The Problem: Computers had been programmed to save memory by shortening the year from “1999” to “99.” When the calendar rolled to “00,” systems might think it was 1900, not 2000.

• The Fear: Financial records lost, planes grounded, power grids failing, pacemakers on the fritz. Civilization undone by a two-digit oversight.

• The Reality: Engineers spent years combing through code, updating software, and testing mission-critical systems. By the time midnight struck, the world’s computers were largely ready.

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Panic in the Streets (and the Newsrooms)

News outlets sold Y2K like a front-row seat to Armageddon.

• CNN countdowns tracked “hours until meltdown.”

• Survival guides sold out of bottled water, generators, and canned beans.

• Preppers stockpiled supplies in bunkers, ready to wait out the digital collapse.

If you were a journalist, Y2K was the perfect apocalypse: scary enough to drive ratings, vague enough that no one really understood it.

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On the Front Lines of Nothing

I was there (10,000 years ago, Gandalf), headset on, working New Year’s Eve as a cable modem support technician. The phones rang, not with system crashes, but with anxious customers asking the same question:

“Is everything okay?”

Yes, everything was okay. The internet was still online. Their modems still worked. The biggest outage was the time I lost babysitting their collective paranoia instead of ringing in the New Year with my friends.

In the end, Y2K wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t even the end of my shift...and people wonder why I have a weird obsession with doomsday prophecies.

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The Apocalypse That Never Was

Looking back, Y2K was a kind of dress rehearsal for modern doomsday culture.

• It showed how fear could spread faster than facts.

• It proved that governments and corporations will spend staggering amounts of money to avoid embarrassment.

• And it gave us the odd comfort of a doomsday that quietly slipped past without incident.

Today, we might laugh about it — but in 1999, we held our breath as if midnight itself was radioactive.

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Why It Still Matters

Y2K didn’t destroy civilization. But it left us with a valuable lesson: sometimes the scariest apocalypses are the ones we invent for ourselves.

And let’s be honest — if we survived Y2K, we can probably survive the next wave of AI autocomplete errors.

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Further Reading

Smithsonian: How We Survived Y2K

Computer History Museum: The Y2K Bug